Lightning Press

[Vaxalon]

Okay, I've got an idea.

It would require a partnership between PDF publishers, game stores, and print shops.

Here's how the process works.

The customer is at the game store, and sees a kiosk for this service... basically, it's a computer with a CD-rom full of PDF documents. This computer could be pretty cheap because all it has to do is show PDF's. He can read through them to find ones that he likes. When he finds one he wants to buy, he takes down a code and goes to the register.

At the register, the customer gives the code, and pays for the book. This price covers everything... the publisher, the store, and the printing costs. At the register, the store notifies a local kinko's, etc. of the sale, and they start printing. The customer gets a ticket which he then brings to the print shop to pick up his book.

This would probably work best if there were one company at the center of the operation, which could handle the distribution of money for the PDF's sold at the stores.

 

[jmucchiello]

A few problems, perhaps you have solutions:

1) In most gaming stores, space is at a premium, so in order for the owner to give up the space for a kiosk, the provider has to guarentee a certain monthly return to cover the rent.

2) The whole point of PDFs is to eliminate the printing costs. Printing at Kinko's is like 10-20 times more expensive than at a normal printing house. And not only will they look bad, but the publisher lacks quality control here.

2a) The customer has to go to two stores to get their product? What's his incentive?

3) Programming the system so the store owner is forced to send the money back to the publisher is not free. Without this programming how does the publisher know his book sold.

4) Usually the store pays for goods and then sells them. In this case the store sells the goods and then must pay a commission back to the publisher. Do you think the publishers will want to have to send collection agencies to dozens of little shops in order to get the $10-30 owed to them? Do you think RPG shops want to deal with a payment system that goes against the other 99% of their sales? Who's going to pay to train the guy behind the counter who only knows about comic books and just stares at you blankly when you ask an RPG question?

5) These computers have to have internet connections in order to be updated. Or, the store owner has to spend the time installing a CD each month or two. The CDs have to be pressed and mailed to each store. This is not a free operation. There are over a thousand RPG stores potentially.

6) Remember, there is no possiblity of benefit from volume sales because anRPG book considered a hit may not sell more than 2,000 copies over 6+ months.

Now, I don't mean to be a downer, I'd like something like this to be possible. But this idea has come up before and these are the problems that came up in those threads. It would have to be a single company, its business plan would involve partnering with Kinko's and the PDF publishers, finding a cheap source of hardware (or just providing a secure software package), writing a secure sales system that when a book went to Kinko's you knew about it and knew what store generated the sale, and you would have to get the TSR ESDs on board from the start if you wanted to have prayer of success. The software costs alone are non-trivial. You also have to cause a single sale to put money in three peoples hands: the store, the Kinko's and you, which you then send to the publisher.