PDF's and page counts

[cthuluftaghn]

Hi all,

For those of you that have been keeping up on either my web site updates, or my main thread on this forum, you know that my wife and I are working on creating a comprehensive campaign world source book. I know that publishers of printed products are very concerned about page count, due to the cost of printing. However, is there any such concern applicable to PDF publishing?

I'm projecting that this book will round out at about 250 pages, or so. I'm trying to be conscious of file size, for those who do not wish to purchase the book on CD... I've PDF'd several single pages, and they come out to anywhere from 50-80kb per page, or 40-70 zipped. Muliply that out, and we're looking at a 15-17mb finished product.

For a complete source book... hopefully of the size and scope of books like Forgotten Realms and Kalamar... is that reasonable for a PDF product? Keep in mind that I intend to add a printer-friendly text-only version to the .zip file. That'll raise the .zip size a bit.

Input appreciated,
Thanks!

 

[jmucchiello]

Well a few perhaps obvious suggestions. Break the source book into mini books. Pretend you are selling a boxset.

So book 1 is lands of whereever. (geography, weather, etc)
book 2 is people of whereever. (notable npcs, kingdoms, trade routes)
book 3 is Player's guide to whereever. (contains the crunchy bits and social bits every player knows)
book 4 is mysteries of whereever. (contains the DM only stuff, secret societies, evil PrCs, magic items)
And finally, include a high resolution copy of the world map in the zip. Put a low-res one in the lands book.

If you are ambitious create a bunch really minibooks for "I grew up in such-a-place and this is what I know about the world"

Now a potential DM could print out the player's information easily and not worry about them. If structured correctly, he would only need to print certain parts of the other books as the party headed to those parts of the world.

In any case, remember that you have a zipfile that can hold any number of books and pamphlets. Make use of that.

Joe Mucchiello
Throwing Dice Games
http://www.throwingdice.com

And if I may hijack the thread slightly. My PDF was set at 9 point for the bulk of the text (headings went from 11 - 15 point). Does anyone have an opinion on if that was too small, not small enough?

 

[Darrin Drader]

I think you're going to run into some interesting issues here. On one hand, you can give customers a great value for the money by giving them 250 or so pages for around $10, but then you're going to get into a situation where people don't want to buy it just because of the sheer page count. Not everyone has access to a laser printer and a binder, so they will have to print this out on their ink jet printer and then pay someone (Kinkos for example) to have it bound. When you factor in the price of ink, which is really pretty spendy (estimate 10 for a project this size), the $5 to get it bound, the $2.50 for the price of half a ream of ink jet paper, and the $10 for the purchase, you're looking at an actual price tag of about $27.50 to print out a project like this. By comparison, there are some hard bound books out there with a similar page count for a comparable price.

As stated by jmucchiello, you might do well to break this up into smaller products. Why? Because the cost of production is smaller for each individual product. The overall price tag might be much higher in the long run, but this gives customers the option to only print out what they will use or to skip entire sections of the project. It also gives you a steady stream of releases, which keeps your products in the eyes of the gaming community, and makes you more money. If the first product does well, then this could translate into more sales over the long haul.

A good example of all this is Darwin's World by RPG Objects. I don't know what their sales look like, but judging by the fact that their production value keeps going up, I would say they're probably doing pretty well.

 

[HellHound]

Please note that a multi-page PDF is smaller than the equivalent number of single-page PDFs. Background images are saved once in a PDF, for example, thus making the file smaller.

If you really need help with PDFing, feel free to contact me.

 

[cthuluftaghn]

Thank you, Hellhound. That is good to know. In other words... If I have 10 chapters, and each chapter has the same .jpg background for each page, then that's really only 10 .jpg's that are saved in the PDF, not 250-300 of 'em?

That will drastically reduce what I feared the file size to be. I'll experiment when I get home.

I did notice, since my original post, that www.rpgnow.com also offers the option of ordering purchases on CD. I can also burn CD's with nice little covers and sell mail-order directly from my web site.

 

[Scarogoth]

And resolution, of course...

Resolution of the images is also crucial, as I'm sure you know, but it the logarithmic scale that's easy to overlook. Release a 70 page product at 96 dpi (96x96=9216 dots, if you will) with a smattering of art and background art it will probably PDF at around 3-4 MBs. Do the same at 240 it balloons to about 17-18 MBs (240x240=57,600), whereas dropping it to 72dpi (72x72=5184) is almost only half... if that makes sense. Mostly I find 96 dpi is the happy medium, although for really high definition print 240 is nice. 72 dpi is about as low as I'd ever dare go.

Plus as of this week, AladdinSys have released a new version of Stuffit called Stuffit X which can make stuff even smaller Aladdin Sys and by the time you're ready for release, that might have become more readily accepted.

Hope that's helpful, and not patronizingly obvious -- it was meant kindly,

Best Wishes, Dunx.

 

[cthuluftaghn]

Wow. How right you are! I've been PDF'ing at 600dpi, looking for the highest reasonable quality. Y'know what... I did it at 96dpi, and there is almost no visible difference on-screen.... except that the file size is way WAY smaller. Thanks!

 

[MEG Hal]

Wow. How right you are! I've been PDF'ing at 600dpi, looking for the highest reasonable quality. Y'know what... I did it at 96dpi, and there is almost no visible difference on-screen.... except that the file size is way WAY smaller. Thanks!

600dpi....print only needs 300dpi, I agree 72-96dpi is the way to go. Smaller files faster downloads=happier customers.

 

[HellHound]

I personally *now* do all my PDFs at 150 dpi. It's a fair middle ground... 96 and 72 dpi are just too coarse for most printing when it comes to the art.

I released two of my PDFs at 300 dpi, but that's old news.

Someone sent me a copy of Gar'Udok (an 11 meg 300 dpi book) redone at 96 dpi. Looks just as good as my copy on screen (but not when printed) and is only 2.3 megs.

 

[Scarogoth]

PDF sizes

Yes. I'd like to do 150dpi stuff as well in an ideal world, but I find the file sizes with the amount of artwork I'm often dealing with (non-repeating, sadly...) just ups the file sizes too much for people with modems to feel comfortable with, particularly as we tend to release two versions of the product at the same time -- a full colour, reasonable resolution version and a B&W, borderless, ink-cartridge friendly version. At RPGNow at the moment, these need to go in to the same Zip file, which of course makes it even larger when it's time for download.

Now if there were a way of selecting the download size you were prepared to put up with, so that we could offer a range of resolutions from 72dpi to 300dpi, that would be great, but a bit of a legistical nightmare, I shouldn't wonder... ;-)

And Hal, I agree with you, naturally, that 300dpi is a good minimum for professional print, but 240dpi I find is acceptable for colour images on most people's inkjets, given their scatter patterns. However, just to confuse the issue even more, of course, this would not be the same for any line art, but I mostly tend to do greyscale instead anyway, as it's mostly jpgs I'm sent to work with these days.