NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="3catcircus" data-source="post: 4749910" data-attributes="member: 16077">Indeed - about a year ago when Rouse was on here touting 4e and the plans for how people could get pdf's, I called him out on it and basically told him he was a liar (the thread where he placed me on ignore).  I'm not happy to say "I told you so" when it came to that prediction.It doesn't matter - someone will (out of spite, desire to beat the technical challenge, whatever) figure out a way to download and save the files.  Look at how quickly youtube grabbers morph when youtube changes their code to prevent downloading videos...The most amazing thing about their decision to yank pdfs is that is doesn't appear that they considered that the rate of piracy will start out very high at the beginning of a product's release and then taper off - just like the sales themselves do.  The 10:1 ratio would drop off rather quickly.  Of course, it doesn't help them that free trumps $20 any day.As far as the older stuff (or even the newer stuff), I'd be willing to bet that the amount of available pirate copies will increase over the coming weeks.  Have a problem with PHB2 piracy?  Fine - yank that title, but 10 sales/day out of your back catalog is better than no sales/day.Probably less time than that.  I work with low-end publishing (MS Word -> PDF).  It takes the clicking of a single button and waiting a few minutes to have a fully-indexed PDF.  I imagine that higher-end publishing using industry-standard publishing software is not much more than that - especially since you can batch-file the distilling to do multiple books (i.e. - you can set the batch file up to do the entire 3.5 catalog and come back in a few hours and it'll be done).  Bookmarks and and index *aren't* redundant because (especially with large pdfs), it is quicker to look in the TOC or index rather than do a search. Of course, once the master PDF copy is made, other than individualizing each sale (with ye olde hidden micro-watermark) which takes less than a minute, there is no NRE cost involved - it is all profit.IIRC, at the beginning, legal 3.x PDFs where inferior to pirated copies.  I don't know if the same was true for 4e pdfs.  That having been said - a poorly scanned pdf is preferable to no pdf, so I'm fairly confident that WotC's entire catalog will become more prevalent as pirated copies.  Especially since now they know to also remove the micro-watermark in addition to the visible one.</blockquote>

Verification