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Message: <blockquote data-quote="madelf" data-source="post: 1547334" data-attributes="member: 15415">A fair question. The answer is... one.The reason is... it was mine.I haven't purchased any others at all (though I've been looking longingly at Sidewinder Recoiled). But I'm really not a good sample of the consumer side of things. I've only bought three PDFs total (and they were not available as POD or I would have bought them as such). I haven't gone to a brick & mortar store and purchased a game book since D&D3  came out (and I regretted that purchase). Honestly I just don't spend much on game books at all.  Fortunately there are others who do, and those are the ones who's heads I want to get inside.  But, looking at my own position and thought process, I can reliably say that I know what my buying patterns would be if I felt I had the cash to spare on game products (and did enough actual play to make the spending worthwhile). I would buy very, very few PDFs. The only products I would buy in PDF form are those that are not available in POD, or are of a nature that they would be more (or just as) convenient in PDF, such as short adventures that I could print out piecemeal and mark up, or possibly gm tools like NPC collections or something that might be handy to be able to break up. Any cohesive "game book", I would buy in POD over PDF in every single case. Any book of significant length (anything over 50 or so pages) would be very rare for me to buy  in PDF even if it were the only way it was available, it would have to be an absolute "must own" game. In most cases I would simply buy a different game that I could get in an actual book form. Now, whether the book is POD or standard print would make little difference to me. I have to drive over a half hour to get to the nearest bookstore that carries WotC and White Wolf products. I have to drive about an hour and a half to get to anything resembling a respectable game store, and even that has very limited selection. Generally the games I would be interested in (and in actuality, the vast majority of rpgs made) will never get anywhere near where I could walk into a store and look at them. (And this is a common complaint, so I know I'm not alone. Many people have difficulty finding a decent selection of games in stores)  So I would be buying games from the internet anyway. Whether the book is on a shelf waiting to be shipped, or in a computer file waiting to be printed, would make no difference to me. As far as publishing... at the point I'm at, I can't see going into the three-tier distribution system to (hopefully)break even on a standard print run. And you can't really do much better than that without a huge marketing budget. But I've built and promoted a website before. I know how to generate traffic, and I think I can get at least as many people's attention by marketing a game for internet and mail-order sales as I could get to try and order through retail stores. Given that model, POD is nearly perfect. It solves many problems and doesn't seem to have many drawbacks. This is why I'm wondering how come it isn't used more often. Is there an actual reason it is not successful, or has it just not yet come into its own?</blockquote>

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