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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aezoc" data-source="post: 1535417" data-attributes="member: 12124">My illegal PDF downloads fall into two categories: previewing a book I'm considering buying, or downloading a book that has no PDF version for sale that I'm not going to use enough of to justify paying for a print copy.I live in an area with no FLGS; the closest is an hour or so away, the F part of this FLGS is questionable, and it is more of a comic shop than anything. More often than not I have to order the book from them because they don't stock much RPG stuff, which means that I don't get to flip through it and make sure its what I want first. Consequently, I wind up downloading copies of some books to skim them and make sure I consider it worth buying. I consider this to be the online equivalent of thumbing through the book at the store, as other posters have said.What I consider to be worth buying depends heavily on how much of it I intend to use. This seems fairly obvious, but if I only intend to use a small portion of your $30 full-cover hardback, then I will either choose to ignore the book completely, or download an illegal PDF version. Either way, you aren't making any money off me.Last is a factor that I haven't seen mentioned as much - the convenience of PDFs. If I'm going to be compiling my campaign from a lot of different sources, the value of "book in hand" is essentially zero to me. Yes, it looks nice on the shelf, and if I actually flip through it, there may be beautiful artwork, but if I'm only using a portion of the book, I'd much prefer to compile my own documents and use those at the table, instead of lugging around a huge pile of books so that I can reference a few pages from each. PDFs (at least ones with OCR) are awesome for this. Click, drag, ctrl-c, ctrl-v, and a few modifications, and it's done. Much faster and less painful than typing the entire thing up from a book or hauling said book around all the time. Thus, even if your work was offered in print and as a PDF and the prices were the same, I would likely choose the PDF version unless I intended to use a lot of the book.Overall, I really have no idea how much of my views are shared by the rest of the RPG community. I don't at all consider myself to be thumbing my nose at any company, even the big guys, when I download a PDF. I've been playing RPGs since I was about 9 or 10, and the decline of the industry is the last thing I want to see. That said, I'm not willing to pay money for poorly written content or content that is uninteresting to me. The thing is that for books that I download instead of buying, the parts that I use are almost invariably OGC, there's just no way to get them without paying for the parts that I don't want. Hell, I would happily shell out a few bucks for just the OGC portions of a lot of books. Seems like a great deal for the publisher to me - a little copy/pasting and some formatting, and they make money on stuff that I could use (legally, if not ethically) for free!Unfortunately, I doubt many if any publishers will release their compiled OGC, but if more publishers just released PDF versions of their work, or even better, subdivided PDF versions (like Malhavoc did with AU), I'd be a VERY happy camper.</blockquote>

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