D&D 5E PDFs and Next

[SkidAce]

It's annoying to carry books from a place to another to play D&D.

This is iPad and Android time.

Books should be available on PDF or some sort of ebooks.

You youngsters...

Back in my day we had to carry our dnd books back AND forth from one place to another....

....uphill both ways...
...no shoes...
...waist high snow and blazing sun....

WITH OUR BARE HANDS!!!!!!!

Bah...bah I say....

 

[Umbran]

IMO, that's punishing the entirety of their customer base for the sins of a few. I find that insulting.

As a hypothetical only (not getting into politics): if a State decided to take away the right of all Senior Citizens to drive

Wait. Stop right there. Analogy fail.

Senior citizens have a right to certain personal freedoms.

You don't have a "right" to have a book in pdf format.

Your argument only holds if you feel you are somehow entitled to have the product you want, in the exact format you want. Your rights are in no way curtailed by them not providing pdfs. Meanwhile the company does have a right - a real, legal right - to decide how to manage their products.

Now, when we are young, our parents may withhold something we want (like, TV time or videogame time) as punishments. But we aren't kids any more - shouldn't we recognize now that sometimes we can't get exactly what we want?

Which is not to say that you can't choose not to buy until they fulfill some certain criteria - even completely arbitrary criteria. It is your money, that's your call.

As for their reasons - I understand the argument that restricting sales of pdfs does not actually curtail piracy. However, what *I* understand is irrelevant. If we assume that that was the truth, and the whole of the decision*, and that they were honestly trying to act in the interests of the business and the brand. Basically, you are saying you are insulted by someone else honestly trying to do their job properly.

People make mistakes. Waiters spill coffee on us, paperwork gets lost, business decisions that don't really reflect reality as we understand it get made. That's not a good reason to feel insulted, is it?




*I don't make that assumption. I actually think there's much more to it than piracy. However, I don't believe we are entitled to their reasoning, either.

 

[El Mahdi]

Wait. Stop right there. Analogy fail.

Senior citizens have a right to certain personal freedoms.

You don't have a "right" to have a book in pdf format...

The point of the analogy wasn't about rights, it was about the intertwining of reason (or intention) and a subsequent action based on that reason. The two are intertwined. You can have the reason without the action, but you can't have the action without the reason (people don't do things randomly or make decisions in a vaccuum); therefore if the reason is insulting, so is the action.

I don't feel I'm entitled to have the product I want. But I do have the right to apply pressure with my money, in an attempt to influence a company into providing the product I want. Just as they have the right to not provide a product I want, I have the right to choose whether I do business with them.

It's not a matter of entitlement, just a case of voting with my wallet. If WotC want's my money, then they need to provide pdf's. If my money is not that important to them, then they won't. It's that simple.

But none of that forbids me from voicing my opinion of their decision, which I think was misguided and unresaonable...and yes, insulting to their customers.

Fortunately for me, I do believe there are a significant amout of people who stopped purchasing WotC products largely based on this issue. I'm hoping it's large enough to convince WotC to return these products for sale again.

 

[billd91]

*I don't make that assumption. I actually think there's much more to it than piracy. However, I don't believe we are entitled to their reasoning, either.

We may not be entitled to internal discussions and rationales, but I think we should expect them not to lie to us. They cited piracy - did they make their announcement as if that were the only reason or that there were other, unspecified ones as well? The latter should be more acceptable than the former because the first one really is, at least partly, lying to us. I believe we are entitled to expect the truth or at least not outright deception.

 

[Alzrius]

I like physical books; they're my format of choice for when I want to sit down and read something for an extended period of time.

However, the physical space on my bookshelves is at a premium. I simply don't have that much room for more, so I have to weigh carefully what books I want to buy and keep handy. Having electronic copies is much more convenient for me, as it frees me from this limitation.

That and I also already carry around far too many paper materials to my game and back each week. Electronic books save me the strain and hassle that comes from trying to figure out how to carry more books in addition to the ones in my bag.

In other words, not having electronic copies would put a large damper on my enthusiasm for Fifth Edition - not necessarily a deal-breaker, but if I were on the fence it could be the deciding factor.

 

[Herschel]

While a very small issue, another thing pdfs are horrible for is passive advertising of a product. You don't see pdfs sitting on the shelf at the store and people walking by a table of gamers playing don't see those bright, shiny logos and books on a pdf. With a few dice and maybe a few miniatures they could be playing anything. With those colorful books laying out even casuall observers know exactly what you're playing.

Also, what percentage of the population even owns tablets, let alone split between Apple and other? It may be growing, but they may have data showing that that portion of the market isn't big enough to really worry about yet. At the rate new tech is coming out, throwing a bunch of resources at a potentially soon-obsolete medium doesn't make much business sense.

 

[Agamon]

Did WotC ever confirm that the reason for the pdfs being pulled was piracy? That seems so incredibly naive. Especially for a group of professionals. Even lawyers.

Or maybe it just seems that way now, as opposed to then. But with what was happening with music and Apple, I'd have thought the writing was on the wall.

 

[Agamon]

Also, what percentage of the population even owns tablets, let alone split between Apple and other? It may be growing, but they may have data showing that that portion of the market isn't big enough to really worry about yet. At the rate new tech is coming out, throwing a bunch of resources at a potentially soon-obsolete medium doesn't make much business sense.

You think we'll be moving away from hand held electronic devices? To what? If some sort of implant chip is coming, it's not right over the horizon.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I think Next will probably have some sort of e-publishing.

The thing is that "smart devices" and apps and the like are, at the moment, primarily an upper-middle class (sub)urban technophile's playground, and not much else. It's expanding -- it's bigger than it was 5 years ago! -- but it's still fairly limited. If all of your customers are upper-middle class technophiles, no problem. If you'd like to reach a broader market than that, you can't limit your approach to a smart device app.

Computers are fairly reliably middle-class appliances at the moment, and anything you can do on a website would work fine (and have the added benefit of working on any web-connected smart device). It would offer you less control and more exposure to potential piracy, but I think even paranoid legal teams at this point should realize that the way to combat piracy is to provide an economical alternative, not to stop providing it. If you let people buy PDFs for $1-$5, they'll line up to do it. If you offer folks a subscription for $10/month for access to the entire D&D library, you're going to get a lot of folks on board. Yeah, some stuff will probably get scraped, but if your price point is low enough, the normal consumer is going to take the easy legal official option over the questionable virus-ridden download option.

WotC needs to not fear piracy. They also need to not fear open source, but that's a different conversation.

 

[Herschel]

You think we'll be moving away from hand held electronic devices? To what? If some sort of implant chip is coming, it's not right over the horizon.

Maybe even more like a different form or format. For example, maybe they think Adobe Acrobat Reader on its way out the door soon or a new smartphone platform is coming that will change things, or maybe they haven't gotten the deal they wanted from Apple or Google or Microsoft or whomever, there's a lot of things that could be a factor that aren't just which current hgadgets some people have. The tech world is changing so fast and many (most?) volume sellers are using "The Cloud" instead of you storing the data locally.