It's been three years since D&D Beyond launched and I see many people, here and elsewhere, gladly pay for the physical copy of a release and then again for the virtual copy.
There are companies 1/100th the size of WotC that will gladly provide a virtual copy of the physical book you bought for free, and have been doing it for years (Not to mention they're generally normal PDFs that aren't tied to a service).
My question is this: is the consensus that this is fine and normal and the other publishers are wrong or should we be banging a drum about how this is a anti-consumer practice?
I haven't "paid twice" for any 5E books.
All my books are on Beyond. I'm leery of the long-term consequences of this, but currently trust that when 5E is replaced by the inevitable 6E, WotC and Beyond will arrange something reasonable. But the ease of use is so massive from Beyond, and the fact that my house is no longer full of books and print-outs and more books is a good thing, so I'm okay with that.
I think Beyond's pricing for single-items from books is predatory and ridiculous, but you don't have to engage with it. They are perfectly fine with you using their extensive and effective "homebrew" stuff to make copies of items (and races, and subclasses and so on) from books you don't own, you just can't share them.
On top of that, I've actually paid quite a lot less for the material I have, because Beyond has often had large discounts (25-33%), which can be applied to bulk purchases. I didn't buy the "everything" package because honestly you couldn't pay me to say, have Tortles in my game, but I bought all the books I needed when I started running 5E with some kind of large discount, and every time since when I've bought books it has been with a similar discount (25-33%).
One thing that also makes me feel good about Beyond is their app for reading the books. Initially I was like "ugh these guys suck, no PDFs!???!", and when the app was only on iOS, as it was initially, I refused to do business with them (we just didn't play 5E, we played Dungeon World). But once it got on Android, and I tried it with the free stuff, I was really impressed - it's actually much easier to read/use than PDFs on even my Chromebook. Indeed, my Chromebook (which flips into a tablet) makes it very much like reading an actual rulebook if I'm just laying on the sofa or something.
If I really was having to pay twice, and just getting the rulebook and a PDF, with nothing else, I'd be pretty annoyed (and likely just buying the PDFs and then printing them out as needed), but that's not the case. The added functionality from Beyond is amazing and so far has continuously and steadily improved for a very long time.