[Forked Thread: WotC president Greg Leeds] Ask Wotc to set older titles on a POD shop

[JohnRTroy]

I think this would work for many of the 3e products, since PDFs are likely printer-ready and have high-quality files available.

However, the real legacy products, such as works from 1e/2e are probably not very suitable, because of the quality of the scans, which in a lot of cases were primitive. You're not going to get a good copy of the "White Box", the Basic Sets, the AD&D hardcovers, or older modules. I doubt they'd work well in POD. In that case, I just wish they'd keep selling PDFs of the really ancient stuff.

 

[xechnao]

I think this would work for many of the 3e products, since PDFs are likely printer-ready and have high-quality files available.

However, the real legacy products, such as works from 1e/2e are probably not very suitable, because of the quality of the scans, which in a lot of cases were primitive. You're not going to get a good copy of the "White Box", the Basic Sets, the AD&D hardcovers, or older modules. I doubt they'd work well in POD. In that case, I just wish they'd keep selling PDFs of the really ancient stuff.

Isn't there a software that can measure the angles of text blocks and align them? I know there is plenty of hand written text recognition software. Alternatively couldn't they OCR them?

 

[Brown Jenkin]

Awsome idea. I would buy them in preference to PDFs.

 

[fjw70]

Actually I would like to see WotC do to the pre-3E stuff what they did to the Star Frontiers stuff -- allow it to be freely copied and distributed. I can't imagine that they are making much on these products nowadays.

This way some fans could recreate these products digitally and we could have cleaner copies of them.

But i am probably dreaming.

 

[kenmarable]

Technical question here, because I'm ignorant about printing matters.

What happens if you upload to Lulu (or some equivalent service) a PDF that contains a crappy scan as opposes to an OEF?

I think that all the pre-3e PDFs are scan and the quality of those I've seen isn't that great.

What is the end result? Is the quality of the printed book acceptable?

A quick check at my PDFs - the files are OCR'ed. So the text is actual text. So that helps improve the chances of decent print outs.

My other question is what about poster maps that were scanned into sections. It would truly be awesome if those could be included as poster maps again, even at the needed higher cost, but that probably ain't gonna happen.

 

[Nikosandros]

A quick check at my PDFs - the files are OCR'ed. So the text is actual text. So that helps improve the chances of decent print outs.

I have several of the PDFs and the OCR is far from complete. In some on them, like the Mythus Books, the OCR is almost non-existent.

In the AD&D PHB, which is the book I use the most since I run two AD&D PbEM, the OCR is not bad, but the tables are incomplete.

Also, I printed some pages and the quality was rather poor; hence my doubts about the feasibility of sending those files to a POD facility.

 

[Lanefan]

Someone has to ask...well, even if only me:

What the hell is POD?

Lan-"techno-idiot"-efan

 

[rogueattorney]

Print On Demand

 

[Korgoth]

What an entirely excellent idea!