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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rygar" data-source="post: 6333996" data-attributes="member: 6756765">Those are the numbers for E-book sales though Jester...<a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremygreenfield/2013/11/19/hardcover-sales-growth-outpacing-ebooks-in-2013/" target="_blank">http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremygreenfield/2013/11/19/hardcover-sales-growth-outpacing-ebooks-in-2013/</a>If E-books require some specific standout title in some specific niche to demonstrate strength,  then they're a niche.  If E-books were not a niche product,  then it wouldn't require some specific title to outsell hardbounds, they would show the same sales pattern.I'm not arguing that E-books are failing.  I'm just stating that they're a niche product,  with a relatively low penetration,  and designing a business strategy around them is planning to fail.  They're a great side-product to cater to that niche which they will appriciate and readily purchase,  but they're insufficiently large if the plan is to succeed on a mass market scale. My point was,  the PC's who are subject to piracy are generating more revenue than all of the consoles combined,  despite piracy.I'm going to have to disagree with you.  4th edition's issues were a direct result of the number of people rejecting 4th edition,  blaming it on anything else is just trying to avoid root cause.  Would 4th edition have sold some more units if people hadn't rejected it?  Certainly.  Would it have changed the outcome?  Definitely not.  As such,  DDI and all other factors are irrelevant,  the root cause was sufficiently large enough that even without all of the other problems,  the conclusion wouldn't have changed.The recession is a great example of the many things people point at to justify 4th edition's problems by avoiding the number of people it drove away,  during 2008 and 2009,  the peak of the recession,  console game sales hit their peak.  They showed growth for both years despite the recession,  so it is extremely unlikely that people were paying $60 a pop for video games that only last 20 hours or so without care,  but wouldn't buy 3 books that would last indefinitely.  If people weren't buying the books in those years it wasn't because of the recession,  it was because they weren't interested in the game.I also think you're not fully analyzing the revenue from both DDI and books sufficiently.  What is the profit margin from the sales of books to one customer over 6 months?  Would they have bought every book?  Would that number exceed $17 per person?  DDI was "Free money",  the cost of delivering the content was so low that the revenue is almost all profit.  The profit margin on a book is very low.  It is entirely possible that people signing up every 6 months yields nearly the same revenue as buying the books they would've bought normally.  I'm a little surprised that you're asserting that the reason why Hollywood is making more money than ever in the theaters is because the country that is historically the piracy capital of the world is going to the theaters.  That just demonstrates what I'm saying,  if the country that historically has one of the largest piracy rates is happily paying for their content in sufficient numbers to generate huge revenues then piracy obviously cannot be a very big issue.So in the end,  what we're talking about here is the portion of the market interested in E-books,  and the portion of that market that will pirate.  The number I'm finding for E-books is 20% of the market,  so we're talking about a fraction of that.  Even if every single one of that 20% pirated 4th edition instead of buying it,  4th edition was still in trouble.  For that number to be relevant,  the number of people buying 4th edition had to be large enough that the 20% didn't actually matter anyways.  If you have 1,000,000 people and 200,000 aren't paying then it would make it difference,  but if you have 100,000 people and 20,000 aren't paying,  the problem is that you only have 100,000 players,  not the 20,000.</blockquote>

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