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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GM Lent" data-source="post: 9646086" data-attributes="member: 6798775">Lots of responses here, and some great points. Thanks, everyone! I feel this. The first harcover I ever produced has slightly oversized text (by which I mean an 11 point font instead of 10 point) and a couple of folks commented on it, but it sure is easier to read.I'm looking at a pair of zine/digest sized books on my shelf that both top 200 pages; a 230 page hardcover and a 300 page softcover. I hadn't really thought about it before, but the hardcover definitely stays open easier, if only because I don't wantt o break the spine on the softcover. On the other hand, I also have an 80-page digest sized book that is perfect bound, and I basically never use it even though it has a ton of great content, because it won't stay open easily. I think it would work better as a shorter 8.5 x 11 sadde stitch book, but that's not what the creator chose to do. I like that thought process: make stuff match the main line you're writing for. These days I almost exclusively play (and make stuff for) Dungeon Crawl Classics, and prior to that I was a big D&D guy for decades, which probably informs my 8.5 x 11 preferences.This more or less lines up with my preferences too. It's funny; at first I was going to argue that my dislike for zine/digets/A5 size books had to do with not being able to read the titles on the spines. But of course that's true of any saddle-stitch book, and I have dozens of A4/8.5 x 11 saddle-stitched adventure modules, so I don't even know. Hear, hear. And even when a creator provides screenshots or whatever in a crowdfunding campaign, it can be hard to tell. I have an adventure I bought that turned out to be a zine size book printed with a double column of text and it's pretty illegible (at least to my aging eyes). I wish I'd paid closer attention to the specs when I backed it.You make a few great points here.In theory I like the idea of having non-D&D books be differently sized so they're easy to spot on the shelf, but in practice that doesn't really affect me much because most of the stuff i have is 8.5 x 11, across decades of gaming.Great call on the fact that poor design is poor design, and of course the larger volume of full-size books measn that proportionally, many more of them will have the shoddy design.I've made one landscape style book, but unfortunately it's never been broadly vailable in print because it's through DM's Guild and at least when I put it out landscape format wasn't an option for PoD books there (not sure if it is now). It's too bad because I think it's a really cute book (it's about giant space hamsters, with copious references to 80s and 90s action and sci-fi movies) and my kid helped me write it. I made two print copies of it, one for my kid and one for my editor's, but that's been all.</blockquote>

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