I doubt very, very much Hasbro is that involved with D&D. Hasbro managers have their own company to manage, with its billion dollar brands. D&D is forgettable and likely something they leave entirely to WotC, only dealing with reports and summaries and generalities. Day-to-day and month-to-month is likely all WotC. So PDFs seem like upper WotC management...
Heh, then you severely underestimate the bureaucracy of your average corporation. My company has to have EVERY hiring decision approved by our parent company, for example, let alone more important decisions like pricing, strategy, etc. WotC's upper management will certainly come up with the company strategy, but ultimately Hasbro will sign off on it.
And don't assume the size of revenue is a factor either. The group within my company is only a fraction of the total employee base and barely a trickle of our company's revenue, and probably close to a rounding error for our parent company, but our project is watched closely all the way up the line to the parent company's CEO. Sure, day-to-day decisions are made at the group level, but strategy shifts are reviewed and approved by our parent company, even for my small group. And whether or not to sell PDF's seems more like a strategy decision, not an operating decision.
Revenue/profit isn't the sole determination of importance within a company. My group is seen as a future growth leader, so it's viewed as important. You could be right and Hasbro doesn't care or give much input, but if they see D&D as anything other than a just profit center (e.g., as an IP that could be leveraged for movies), then Hasbro may be far more involved than you think.
If they do bring back PDFs I want them to be (much) cheaper than physical books, but also with more features. Bookmarks and hyerlinks are a must. The earlier PDFs were amateurish. And the competition (especially the many PDF-only 3rd party publishers) really know what they're doing now.
Well, price is less of an issue for me, not because I have unlimited funds, but because I recognize that the physical cost of a book is not the largest cost for producing a book. But otherwise I agree. I buy all my gaming books in pdf form now (even if I buy a hard copy, I still buy a pdf), and the few pdf's I run into now without bookmarks pretty much insure I won't buy anything else from that company.
