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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DSC-EricPrice" data-source="post: 2669655" data-attributes="member: 2110">Today, the good people at Enworld announced their arrival to the pdf retail market. With that announcement came a tantalizing little offering wedged in among the other details – Pick and Mix™. For those who missed the front page or the press release Pick and Mix is a section of the store where customers can pick up 1 and 2 page pdfs for a low price – 49 cents.The idea is an interesting one. At once I was in love. Inexpensive content I could pick and choose. It seemed perfect. Everyone I know has lamented at one time or another the content they paid for and never used. Then I started thinking, which caused me to start reading, which in turn caused me to think even more. In the end, I think Pick and Mix will fail unless its changed, and that it isn’t a good idea for consumers or publishers. Here is why.I immediately began to think about what was being offered. How would I know what I was getting until I bought it? It is only two pages, so it isn’t like they can show me a demo. If they let me browse it before I buy, what would stop other, less scrupulous people from copying the text for themselves? A quick look at the offerings already up confirms my suspicions. Shadowslayer  - A single prestige class - a shadow-curse assassin!  That is all the description offered on one class, and the other offerings are similarly vague. Do they expect me to buy it on a name or a short description? How is that any better than buying a book where there are pages I don’t use? Still, the price was small, right?Wrong. After I downloaded the style guide and license information I discovered that for .49 cents I was getting at MOST two pages of text. That comes up as .25 cents per page! Even the smallest pdfs I’ve bought from RPGNow haven’t been THAT expensive. If the article is just one page the price is even higher. Then there was the color coding. At first blush it sounds like a good idea, but if I print these out and put them in a binder, staying color coded requires me to print in color, something not everyone, including myself, is prepared to do.Opening up the license brought a couple of other big alarms blaring in my head.  Section 10 of the license says I have to release everything but the company logo and name as Open Game Content.  So, everything released here is 100% OGC, meaning that anyone with easy access to the material, particularly in digital format, quickly gains access to LOTS of new material. Given that I have always released content as completely open, this doesn’t really bother me that much, except it makes me leery. This became more bothersome after I reviewed sections 11 and 12. Section 11 says that Enworld controls the release of my offerings, while section 12 says the retail store can release my 100% Open Game Content for free as a promotional item. To me this screams trouble. Not that Enworld really needs a lot of reason to bring people to their site (They routinely have 100s of people online at any given time) but the mere idea that I’d be giving away content for free for someone else’s site without any compensation and with no recourse is alarming, to say the least. There are some assurances in the license about the rate at which material will be released. Strangely, it is this comment, perhaps meant to calm concerns, that concerns me the most. EN World GameStore warrants that no more than one in every 20 (or part thereof) of your Pick ‘N’ Mix™ branded products will be available for free at any given time.Ultimately, I can’t help but think Enworld intends to use these small bits as free material to draw people to the site and the store, without being hassled with paying a reasonable fee to the creators of that content.All these things together paint a pretty ugly picture for me, so unless something changes, I may have to keep these little monster entries in my folder until I can find some other place to drop them in. What do you guys think about Pick and Mix?</blockquote>

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