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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yair" data-source="post: 1823133" data-attributes="member: 10913">I find this pretty amazing. I am certainly not expecting to be making profit from work I did 20 years ago (of course, I was a baby then <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f631.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":o" title="Eek!    :o"  data-smilie="9"data-shortname=":o" />). I guess assesing this is the crux of the problem.I don't think this is a good measure of anything, and that shows the problematic aspect of assessing the "devaluing" of prior work by free redistribution. Obviously the 3.0 and 3.5 PHBs sold very well despite the (large, supposedly) download numbers. Now, did the SRD increase or decrease these sales? I personally believe Ryan Dancey's (sp?) hype, and think it aided sales overall. But I don't think even on this bestseller that any realy evidence exists either way.The problem is not easier when considering other works. Let me try to quantify what I think might be the situation, however, based on nothing but gut feelings:I think essentially the free distribution (whether by Kazaa or SRDs) aids products that serve as frequent reference books, and those that rely on graphics. The kind of books a player wants to have a good-quality book of to use as reference, or that are prohibitly expensive and often of low quality when printed out.I believe the products that suffer the most from free distribution are those used haphazardly, occasionally, and/or electronically. Products that rely on mechancis and open fluff (magic item books, class books) are more at risk from SRDs than those relying mostly on closed content (such as campaign settings). (That puts many of your products in a bad place, I am afraid, philreed.) Fortunately, there are little warehousing costs for electronic products, so that should diminish the lost income, but it is still lost income. For the first kind of product, I think an SRD will actually be benefitial and see no harm whatsoever in distributing one.For the latter kinds of products, SRDs are bad news for the publisher. The SRD essentially means the publisher will make less money (in the long run) from any published book, lowering his income.Hmm. I think I just talked myself out of supporting SRDs for some products...  <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/paranoid.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":uhoh:" title="Paranoid    :uhoh:" data-shortname=":uhoh:" />Edited for grammer. Oh my.</blockquote>

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