[FDP] Big News!

[Fate Lawson]

*nt*

 

[Dana_Jorgensen]

Well, all I can say thus far is I am completely underwhelmed. Aside from being a very vendor unfriendly site, I find it also very consumer unfriendly.

The site runs like its being fed through a 56k modem. And the problem isn't on my end, because I've got 3 mb/s in download bandwidth available, especially at this hour of the night.

Adobe 6.0 won't work on my machine, so any purchase I make will have to be jackhammered into a form I can use, unless they're willing to cough up money to upgrade my OS, because try as I might, I can't get Acrobat 6 to install...

From the sound of it, the DRM is majorly wonkey... copy 10 passages over 10 days, and you're screwed once either limit passes? So much for easy access to OGC.

so now I'm curious about two things.

1.) What are some of the publishers thinking with the insane prices they have slapped on a lot of those PDFs? It has always been a publishing industry wide practice to factor in a discount to cover reasonable paper output costs, except in the case of novels, and I see a lot of instances where that just isn't happening.

2.) I'm also curious as to exactly what sort of incentives they offer for FDP to ditch the Ronin Arts partnership on RPGnow and go with an exclusive deal with drivethrurpg.com.

 

[Cergorach]

From the sound of it, the DRM is majorly wonkey... copy 10 passages over 10 days, and you're screwed once either limit passes?

No, you can copy ten times every ten days...

So much for easy access to OGC.

Why do you think i bought it ;-) It's still faster then typing it in manually or OCRing it.

Be carefull, there are some files on there that are image only (EQ PHB and DMG for example).

 

[johnsemlak]

These pdfs use the Adobe DRM, which is very annoying to say the least... And means you can't open it in Ghost Gum/Viewer (i tried ;-)

I must say i to find it interesting, interesting enough to put my dislike for DRM asside and check it out and see if it's usefull or not.

[edit]
i just ordered:
1 x Tome Of Horrors II (1-58846-992-1) = $27.99
Which is more then i paid for my printed version. It allows me to select text, but only allows me to copy 10 selections in the next 10 days (which sucks). It allows me to print (don't know how much).
[/edit]

Can someone explain this please? What is Adobe DRM?

Are you saying you don't get a PDF you can (within the law) do what you want with?

...

Looking at the site, they have a bunch of OOP GDW products...Interesting.

The Warcraft RPG PDF seems to be a good deal at $17 and change.

 

[Wycen]

Can someone explain this please? What is Adobe DRM?

Are you saying you don't get a PDF you can (within the law) do what you want with?

...

Looking at the site, they have a bunch of OOP GDW products...Interesting.

The Warcraft RPG PDF seems to be a good deal at $17 and change.

Having looked at the site further, I see what they are talking about. DRM is digital rights management and yes it is essentially a restriction on what you can do with the the pdf. From what it looks like, buying a pdf here will only work if you have Adobe Reader 6 or Adobe Acrobat Reader 6 and you have activated Digital Rights Management. You then can do certain things with the pdf as per their FAQ:

What can I do with my eBooks?
By default, we package our books with rights that allow you to print unlimited copies, copy 10 selections of text (or 10 pages if a selection spans multiple pages) to the clipboard every 10 days.

 

[Sledge]

A fair number of their prices are right at or above retail... And btw it may be faster than OCR, but not any more convenient. I could order/buy most of the books on the site in hard copy and scan in and convert the text I want to OGC only as often as I want and for the same price. Seems to me with these books I would have to copy the entire pdf to a text file just to use it on a regular basis.
I recently picked up the Dweomercraft: Familiars and was copying and pasting selections piecemeal first to compare it with other stuff and also for review reasons. I love being able to just go to the source file and grab the text for my spell.

 

[Teflon Billy]

I'm not trying to be a smartass here, this is legitimate question that I would like answerd by anynone who feels they can...

Given the costs of the product at Drive Thru, what is the supposed benefit of it compared to RPG.now (or Amazon for that matter, I got my Exalted stuff through Amazon for way less than Drive Thru's PDF prices)

Seriously...why would anyone use this service?

 

[JoeCrow]

I'm not trying to be a smartass here, this is legitimate question that I would like answerd by anynone who feels they can...

Given the costs of the product at Drive Thru, what is the supposed benefit of it compared to RPG.now (or Amazon for that matter, I got my Exalted stuff through Amazon for way less than Drive Thru's PDF prices)

Seriously...why would anyone use this service?

Exclusive contracts. Malhavoc's and FDP's PDFs are now exclusively distributed through DriveThru, so there's no other place to get them. Apparently White Wolf owns DriveThru, so all their subsidiary labels can only sell PDFs through DriveThru. Guess I'm gonna have to buy Monte's stuff in print and scan it in myself if I want handy access to it. I don't have a lot of interest in crippleware PDFs, especially given the apparent pricing structure over at DriveThru.

It's not a major burden, though. I mostly use Monte's stuff for pleasure reading and the occasional personal game. Malhavoc's OGC declarations kinda discourage professional use.

 

[francisca]

Exclusive contracts. Malhavoc's and FDP's PDFs are now exclusively distributed through DriveThru, so there's no other place to get them. Apparently White Wolf owns DriveThru, so all their subsidiary labels can only sell PDFs through DriveThru.

For me, this is yet another reason not to spend anymore money on WW products, pdf or print. Which sucks, because I really like many of the necromancer and fdp products, especially the counters. Looks like I'm adding FDP to the list as well. (and yes, I know, they don't give a crap about one consumer, blah, blah, blah so spare me the lesson on economics. Also spare me the lecture on maintaining digital rights. I don't pirate or support piracy, and don't want to be punished for it.)

 

[Henry]

What I really want to know is, what CAN you and CAN you NOT do with these DRM PDF's? I read the Wikipedia definition someone pointed out in another thread, but it only spoke in generalities. With the PDF's from Drive-Thru, can you:

Print?

Copy the file?

Copy & Paste?

One thing I cannot stand is a PDF that disallows me from copying and pasting to my Word Documents, or restricts what sections I can print in some way...