Exclusive interview WotC President Greg Leeds

[Maggan]

I agree. But what if the fumbling juggernaut uses its influence to squeeze the smaller guys out of the market? Is that what's happening in relation to Paizo?

I think there are a number of technologies already in place to enable smaller companies to live on, whatever WotC does.

The Internet e.g. is one of the biggest enablers of small print publishing. It allows for customer relations, distribution (PDF and print on demand), easier production, probably lower production costs, a lot of stuff that makes publishing a lot easier.

I don't think WotC can squeeze the smaller guys out of the market. Push them to the margin, maybe, but arguable that has already happened a long time ago.

/M

 

[Staffan]

Then again, I have a theory of my own, and that is that any company that owns D&D becomes "the evil corporate money-grubbing blight on gamerdom" in many gamers eyes. The biggest fish are always seen as the bad guys.

You have a bit of a point, but I can't really agree with you. Before Wizards were bought by Hasbro, and for a while after, they had lots of goodwill in the gaming community. This was partially due to actually acting like people, partially due to the OGL, and partially the residual effect of "saving D&D". Sure, they still made business-like decisions (e.g. cancelling Alternity), but they had people communicating with the community, explaining why, and went to some effort naming "official" fan sites for keeping the torches burning.

I didn't start seeing significant amounts of criticism leveled at them until 3.5e was released, and it wasn't until 4e was announced that things really hit the fan.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

No, they might in fact be better. I've seen pirated pdfs that are of incredible quality, and yes, they have bookmarks, they're searchable, and they have low file-sizes.

You underestimate. Severely.

Also, these sorts of PDFs were around before WotC started releasing its own, which suggests that they'll make a comeback now that WotC isn't producing them.

Early scans were garbage, but like everything, the quality improves as technology and skill improves. Somewhere out there are people who can scan, OCR, index, and bookmark a PDF at near-WotC quality. They're going to do it, and nobody can stop them. Heck, I'm no PDF expert, but given a decent scan--which you can usually get from a $100 desktop scanner these days--isn't the whole OCR process mostly built into Acrobat? Just go through and clean up the typos, and then add the bookmarks by hand. Probably about 10 hours of work if you already know what you're doing.

 

[Maggan]

I didn't start seeing significant amounts of criticism leveled at them until 3.5e was released, and it wasn't until 4e was announced that things really hit the fan.

Well, I remember a lot of talk about the evil of the OGL, the d20STL and WotC wanting to dominate the industry, steal all the good ideas they didn't have any talent themselves to develop and drive every other publisher out of business.

Around 2000 or so, if I remember correctly. These days, people look back on those times and fondly remember how awesome almost everything was. But in hindsight, it is easy to forget the vehement criticism that WotC had to withstand at the launch of 3e and related initiatives.

Sure, they get a lot of flack now as well, but it's difficult for me to weigh the amount against each other. It feels harsher now, but then again, it was pretty darn harsh back in them days as well.

/M

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

I'm not so sure about that....

Most high quality PDFs I've seen DO come from original sources like the Publishers. For many piraters, you do have to go beyond and above. Remember, you have to basically physically destroy the book to properly scan most books and then you have to get the full version of ADOBE to properly index it.

If someone is willing to pirate an RPG book, wouldn't they just pirate Acrobat, too?

That said, in this pirate discussion I'm wondering if any one has a solution other than "you can't stop pirates and WOTC just needs to get over it"

This is the realization that the music industry has come to, and the reason why they now offer DRM-free digital downloads at prices that can compete with "free".

 

[Maggan]

isn't the whole OCR process mostly built into Acrobat? Just go through and clean up the typos, and then add the bookmarks by hand. Probably about 10 hours of work if you already know what you're doing.

The OCR tech built into Acrobat isn't that advanced. The layout of a roleplaying game, the many non-standard words for gaming terms and monster and whatnot makes doing a correction of an OCR:ed PDF an ardous task, taking much more than 10 hours to clean up.

And, I not really sure Acrobat allows for editing OCR:d text in the PDF itself. As far as I know (I might be wrong) the text must be extracted before being edited, and after that reinserted somehow, although that is way over my skill level, if at all possible.

Basically, OCR is not a magic silver bullet to turn scanned PDF:s into squeeky clean text gaming books, as far as I know.

/M

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

That device has nothing to do with montoring the entire Internet. It just watches a LAN (or, to be precise, an Ethernet hub/switch) for .torrent files being transferred. From my quick scan of it, it doesn't seem to react to the actual P2P transfer, just the .torrent file. So if I sent you the .torrent file in a e-mail or an IM, it wouldn't be any wiser.

Hardly any proof that Hasbro can monitor all traffic on the Internet. Do you actually have any clue on how TCP/IP (or BitTorrent) works?

My university network won't let me download .torrent files. So when I need to get something over bittorrent, I can usually find an alternate link that sends the .torrent file as a .txt file, which I then rename. The network also doesn't let me send and receive torrent pieces, so I just switch on encryption, and it can't sniff my packets any more.

I also know more or less nothing about how TCP/IP and BitTorrent work, but I certainly know how to use them. If someone tried to monitor my line for P2P traffic, I'm sure that it would only take 10 minutes of Google before I could conceal my activity.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

The OCR tech built into Acrobat isn't that advanced. The layout of a roleplaying game, the many non-standard words for gaming terms and monster and whatnot makes doing a correction of an OCR:ed PDF an ardous task, taking much more than 10 hours to clean up.

And, I not really sure Acrobat allows for editing OCR:d text in the PDF itself. As far as I know (I might be wrong) the text must be extracted before being edited, and after that reinserted somehow, although that is way over my skill level, if at all possible.

Basically, OCR is not a magic silver bullet to turn scanned PDF:s into squeeky clean text gaming books, as far as I know.

/M

The OCR I'm familiar with is in older science articles scanned for archival in online repositories. Lots of non-standard jargon words in there, and I expect that the people doing the scanning are probably not paid very well--RA salaries, most likely, although I don't know for sure. So it's not crazy to think that someone with a free weekend or two could crank out a professional-quality scan. At least, as professional as JStor is.

The thing is, if I wanted to, I could sit down and type out the PHB 2 in less than a day. Presto, I have a text document. If I were going to be clever, I'd do it line by line as it appeared in the book with returns at the end of each line. No OCR scan required, and I get the text right the first time. Then, assuming that the PDF software I've pirated is reasonably useful, I would just copy-paste or copy-associate the text line by line.

More than 10 hours of work, for sure. But if someone is motivated to produce a good pirated PDF, it's not unreasonable. I can't understand why anyone would want to both scanning in a whole book, clean it up, and assemble it into a PDF in the first place, but maybe I'm just lazy. Still, people do, and the difference between a terrible scan and a good one is simply the level of motivation of the scanner.

Not to mention that if the original scan was good enough (i.e. high-resolution), but not OCRed or bookmarked, someone else could just add those things and repost it. We could call it WikiPiracy. User-edited copyright infringement.

 

[Maggan]

The thing is, if I wanted to, I could sit down and type out the PHB 2 in less than a day.

I bow before your superior typing skills. I only average about 10 000 words a day when I get the speed up, so for me it would take considerable longer, and probably be a lot more frustrating.

/M

 

[Obryn]

More than 10 hours of work, for sure. But if someone is motivated to produce a good pirated PDF, it's not unreasonable.

Except when you're looking at just about anything, it's the first one out there that gets all the attention. The first one that gets out will be the most-commonly shared. If you are an unusual pirate who loves to spend hours carefully checking your OCR and formatting, and who gets the book out a week or two late... Well, you've already lost.

Not to mention that if the original scan was good enough (i.e. high-resolution), but not OCRed or bookmarked, someone else could just add those things and repost it. We could call it WikiPiracy. User-edited copyright infringement.

They could, but why bother when there are new books out there to scan and upload?

I am absolutely not saying that this doesn't happen. Of course it can happen. I'm saying the vast majority of pirate PDFs don't hold a candle to WotC's.

-O