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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 5673727" data-attributes="member: 19675">While I'm not opposed to digital distribution methods- indeed, I recommend them to my clients all the time- but they have downsides I don't want to deal with for my hobbies:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">I do not want to pay a monthly rental fee for something I intend to keep for decades.  That would be economic idiocy. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Don't like p.o.d. for books since the shifting of printing costs to me (who has no economies of scale) gets me an inferior physical product at a higher price OR an equivalent physical product at an even higher price.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Have had enough experience with computer failures, changing data formats and OS/hardware changes to know that even though my data may still be on a certain storage device, I may not be able to retrieve it.  For my hobbies, at least, electronic formats are backups to physical products, not the other way 'round, and will remain that way for as long as it is feasible for me.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Most of the locations where I game, I do not have Internet access.  The one place I do, I have access to all of my books.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">I've used DDI on someone else's machines- generally speaking, I can still find what I want faster in a book than online...especially factoring in login & load times</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">In addition, sometimes, it STILL simply won't let you login.  2 sessions ago, while others were setting up the game, I was logging into the DM's account so someone else could print up their character (he had forgotten it)- and despite careful entry of the login & password, the program kept kicking me out.  It took me nearly 20 minutes to login.  That's unacceptable. It's not like I'm a Luddite.  I haven't used many paper character sheets since 2005.  I've been using the notepad of my portable devices- first, a Palm Tungsten, now an iTouch- to make 95% of my character sheets.  It's a trend I expect to continue. At the same time, it also illustrates the problem I pointed out above: when I upgraded my home computer, my Palm was no longer compatible with it, so I bought my iTouch.  In the meantime, my Palm decided to die.  To retrieve the data I had on it- 300+ RPG related files alone, plus things like a chordbook for an alternative guitar tuning i'd been writing up for 2 years- I had to set up my old computer again (which, THANKFULLY, I had not yet gotten rid of) and burn it all to a CDR. All because the Palm & the iTouch don't talk to each other.</li> </ol></blockquote>

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