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General Tabletop Discussion
*TTRPGs General
PDFs vs. Books - What's your preference?
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<blockquote data-quote="giant.robot" data-source="post: 6241547" data-attributes="member: 93119"><p>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.</p><p></p><p>PDFs win for me for several reasons. The first and foremost is I can carry around a <strong>library</strong> 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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="giant.robot, post: 6241547, member: 93119"] 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 [B]library[/B] 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. [/QUOTE]
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