PDFs vs. Books - What's your preference?

[Yora]

It depends mostly on the content. If I want to have 200+ pages of content, a printed copy is of course the better choice.
But quite often, I am interested only in a few select chapters or the entire thing is only 30 pages long. In those cases the much lower price and instant delivery of pdfs is a major plus. And I usually run games with a low amount of rules and character options, if it's low-level Pathfinder CRB only with just 6 classes, or playing Castles & Crusades. Pretty much everything else I get is about running and perparing games. Things I read through once and nothing I would have to look up during play.

 

[Blackbrrd]

I prefer PDFs because of the shipping price is so high. Typically a pdf will cost 10$, the book 20$ and the shipping 20$, so it's 10$ for the pdf and 40$ for the book. I am going to get a tablet to read the PDFs on, reading them on a computer screen is less than ideal.

 

[steenan]

I prefer PDFs to physical books, for several reasons.

1. PDFs are cheaper. And when I count shipping (I live in Poland), they are much, much cheaper.

2. Well-made PDFs are easy to search and to check for references (bookmarks, links, full-text search).

3. I don't have enough space to keep a lot of physical gaming books. I don't want to keep a half a meter tall stack of books at the table when I play. With PDFs I can keep and access them all on a reader.

4. PDFs + backups, and I have each game I bought for a lifetime. Books get destroyed quite quickly when they get in contact with food, drinks and children.

 

[Agamon]

I prefer pdfs when reading the books, and I prefer dead tree when playing the game. So, I guess both equally, because I like having both.

 

[pjs37]

As a GM I prefer the book because I usually am looking at several things at a time and I bookmark the heck out of them. But that being said my sanity has been saved by PDF's because I don't need to dedicate tons of shelf space to books. So as a result I tend to buy the hardcover source book and any DM guide and then things like monster manuals, expansions and additional source material I tend to use PDF's since I reference them less often. My ipad has become a favorite tool for that purpose.

 

[LucasC]

Outside the RPG environment I don't buy a book unless its an e-book any longer and have not since I bought my first Kindle years ago. However, for RPGs I don't find electronic books to be as convenient as having a hard-copy to flip through so I still enjoy having a printed book.

Ideally, I would like to get a PDF copy included with my hardcopy purchase. That would be nirvana. Then I have the hardcopy for when I'm in my gaming room and the PDF when I'm not, say when I'm sitting on a plane.

Lucas
embersds.com/blog

 

[i037]

I like to collect the books and flip thru the pages, but for use in my D&D games I prefer to just have the PDFs loaded into my iPad.

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

I'm leaning more and more toward PDFs. They're simply so much more practical and have become more so since we got decent tablets capable of handing a 100MB+ PDF without having a cow.

Because I've changed countries a few times in the last few years I've also developed a new appreciation for having as much stuff as possible in digital rather than physical format. Oh, and I live in the Third World now and in a part of the Third World where even Amazon will not deliver (and, even if they did, if your stuff isn't stolen then you still have to pay between one-third and one-half of the assessed value of the goods in customs duties, "storage fees" and other things that represent bribes to corrupt government officials). Other than when I travel, that leaves me with PDFs or a big, fat nothing.

As much as I appreciate - and agree with - what [MENTION=177]Umbran[/MENTION] said about mind maps etc..., I am finding my brain seems to be rewiring itself to handle things digitally. (That might be an interesting research project for someone to undertake.) Five years or so ago I don't think my retention of what I read digitally was even half of what it is now: even at 44, it seems you can train your brain to do new things.

All that said, I still love books and built a library/RPG room to store them but I don't think I will be adding much, if anything, to my physical collection in the future. I actually find myself reluctant to express this - nostalgia is strong in this one - but it's true.

 

[giant.robot]

I voted for strongly preferring PDFs. I love me some books, the tactile experience is irreplaceable. I have tons of shelf space in my apartment dedicated to nothing but collections of gaming books. These however are historical collections, I haven't purchased a dead tree gaming book in the past few years. Whenever I buy a roleplaying book it's a PDF that I read on my iPad.

PDFs win for me for several reasons. The first and foremost is I can carry around a library of gaming books on a device that weighs less than a pound. When playing something like Pathfinder where I'm potentially referencing multiple supplements it's awesome to not need several pounds of books taking up a dinner table. I can also trivially back up my entire game collection (and have done so). I have few worries that a catastrophic event at my apartment will ruin my copies of those books.

Something else I rarely see mentioned is I can mash up game materials either for myself or my players. With paper books the only option is to copy the material by hand or go down to Kinkos to make photocopies. Now I can pull pages from a PDF, insert them into a new one, and e-mail it to players with a bare minimum of effort or fuss. It's cool to hand out player-specific references if such a thing is necessary.

It doesn't hurt that PDFs tend to retail for a bit less than their paper counterparts. This allows my gaming dollar to go further. As a side effect I also tend to pick up huge portions of a publisher's catalog for a particular system. This is great for them because not only am I buying today but because I've invested in the system I'm more likely to buy stuff from them later. It's good for me because I end up with the core materials as well as (hopefully) fun/useful supplements. I'd still buy PDFs if there was no price difference but the lower price means I get more gaming products for the money spent.

So for me it's about 80% convenience and 20% price when it comes to PDF game books. PDFs are becoming more attractive even more attractive with publishers taking better advantage of the medium. It's finally common for PDFs to have bookmarks and TOCs but now publishers are making PDFs tailored for viewing on tablets. The augmented Nova Praxis PDF is an awesome read on a tablet because the graphical elements are real navigational elements. On paper they would just be window dressing but in the PDF they are actual buttons that do something useful in a way that matches the setting.

 

[pickin_grinnin]

I have a very strong preference for books. I don't buy RPG PDFs at all.