If it has DRM, I won't buy into it.
They'be tried that route before. It failed horribly. Best it got them were some publicity cases to use as an excuse to pull legal sales.
Free Culture movement? Color me curious, what's this?
Arg it's a Pirate's Life matey.
They didn't remove old edition pdfs to thwart piracy, they did it to eliminate the "competetion" and actually thought it would cause some of us "holdouts" to go to 4E, since it was at least still putting out books.
Screw 'em. While it would be nice if the books and pdfs were out there to get new players to see them and start learning 3E and older editions, at least there's the SRD and Osric for that. And doing that left me very bitter, I wouldn't buy a 3E product from them again even if they did reverse policy. I'm not very familiar with how torrents work, but I'm a fast learner when necessary.
Personally I think it was on both accounts. From the outset 4E was being stalked by the pirates. Think about it, the core 4E books were pirated before they were even released.
And a torrent learner curve is like a meadow's hill. You can easily see the other side of it.
Well here's my own personal take. The next time I move, if WoTC hasn't announced some sort of digital initiative that enables me to get my books in digital format, I'll be cutting the spines out of mine and making PDF's of 'em. I've got stuff going back to the 80's and it's just not getting physically moved again regardless of what fears WoTC is fighting in the public arena at the time.
But the step of ebooks for the fiction line, which probably make a great deal MORE money, seems to be a step in the right direction.
EEEECCCKKKK! I would rather provide you the PDF's on a nice DVD rom and just simply put all the books in the back of my car. If it's a hefty list of them, I would be willing to make the 10hr drive from my house to Illinois.
Even so, it kinda saddens me that you'd destroy such old and valuable (sentimentally, if not monetarily like old comic books can be) books. I'd rather you just pirate already made pdf copies and donate your books to someone who'd want to keep them.
Ah well, better stop. That's already two pro-piracy posts in a span of a few hours. ENWorld regulations are one thing, the dishonor I'm bringing to ninjas is liable to get me killed.
I wouldn't call it pro-piracy, I would call it more like pro-I-don't-give-a-crap. Most of the pro-piracy statements above are those of fustration and from folks that would actually paid money for the pdf's vice those of us that simply pirate to pirate.
...snip...
Hell, make the old books part of the DDI. Call it the Archieve or something. You can only access 'em while your online but you can book mark 'em , etc......end snip...
I actually think that is a pretty good idea in a way. It would bring many of your older edition players into your DDI fold generating a constant revenue for WotC. Really would it effect them that much for treating each book as it's own section of an archive?
Don't like it being online only though. That was one of the biggiest arguements during the first days of the DDI announcements on weather customers would be able to keep what they paid for or if they were trapped into always being online with an active subscription.
Yanking the old stuff that's OOP was the most mind-boggling move to me. I can see wanting to yank current products to "protect" them from piracy (no matter how misguided that philosophy may prove in the long term), but I seriously doubt those PDFs of the D&D Rules Compendium (which I gladly purchased when I saw it was on sale) were cutting that deeply into their profits.
It boogled a lot of minds. Because the legal PDF sales brought a lot of pirates back into the 'legal' fold. Now essentially they have been told we don't want your money. So what did they do, they simply went back to the Pirate Ship BitTorrent and sailed on their merry way.
Even the pulling of the PDF's didn't stop the pirates as the very next book out was found days after on the torrents and dang near professional scans and bookmarked copies a week after.
And that's why democracy will never work....
Good thing we are a Consititutional Republic and not a Democracy. Most schools forget to teach this nowadays.
If it's any consolation, "the internet" will almost certainly provide a crack or some other kind of work-around in short order. He's cool like that.
Honestly if they came out with a non-Adobe reader with a DRM, the nerdrage alone would dictate someone hacking it by the end of a month.
But back to the OP:
I'm glad to see some digital works are being released.
