[Kobold Press] State of Play: shipping changes threaten the hobby

[Bunch]

Shifting to PDF only is not really any more environmentally friendly. You still have ongoing power and online storage costs for the material. Honestly, PDFs may be worse in the long term than physical books.

Media rate is not a subsidy. It is handled differently than other mail types and is often cached and shipped in bulk with slower delivery times.

I think for preservation purposes, paper is king. But of the millions of books sold and disposed of each year the fraction needed to be in print for preservation purposes are far lower than the total produced. The hot author of the month or even the decade is probably much more environmentally delivered electronically. If you run a special ereader that might change the equation but if you're reading it on your phone, pc, tablet that you already have then the largest environmental cost is pulled out from the electronic solution. Storage and delivery for digital books is very small. Much lower than trucking a car or plane across country to deliver a physical book.

I can't find anything that says Media Mail is anything other than either a loss or at best non profitable. That means in effect it is subsidized by the other mail offerings.

 

[Bohandas]

I have mixed feelings on this. The 1930s goal was to support the spread of information which the internet itself does much more efficiently than mailing objects around.

In theory, but in practice the free exchange of information over the internet is hamstrung by IP law. To borrow something legally for free is probably going to involve some kind of DRM that doesn't work and prevents you from properly reading it at all.

 

[Bohandas]

Shifting to PDF only is not really any more environmentally friendly. You still have ongoing power and online storage costs for the material.

Are you talking about the publisher/seller storing itmor are you talking about having your personal copy in cloud storage? Because if it's the latter than the easy solution is to just store it locally. SD cards are pretty cheap nowadays

 

[Bunch]

In theory, but in practice the free exchange of information over the internet is hamstrung by IP law. To borrow something legally for free is probably going to involve some kind of DRM that doesn't work and prevents you from properly reading it at all.

Depends on the information. I think I could find almost all of the information in all my college textbooks legally and freely available on either a webpage, youtube video or podcast. The libraries still all have PDF or ebook files I can checkout free to me. However from my librarian friends the costs of those "free to me" pdf's are getting very high.

 

[Dire Bare]

State of Play: shipping changes threaten the hobby.​

I told you lost month that I hate shipping. I still do, but I’m going to talk about it anyway, at length, because it is under a credible threat of privatization and increased costs …

Privatization of the US Postal Service and tariffs on all of our traditional trading partners . . . EVERYTHING is about to get more expensive. Games getting more expensive sounds like a "first world problem", and it is, but that also means that as businesses struggle to maintain customers at higher prices and lower profit margins, jobs will be lost.

And considering the direction my country is heading, many of us will be needing the joy and escapism of games more than ever before.

Keep fighting the good fight Kobolds!

 

[nyvinter]

Feel like it's been like this for years now even if it's getting worse.

It doesn't help that postal services all over seem really embarrassed about handling mail and want to penalise people using them. (Cheapest postage for an international letter here in Sweden is now about $4. It's awful and will just hasten the death spiral of mail.)