To WOTC, what about PDFs?

[Tahlvin]

A question for anyone at WOTC: Will you guys ever offer PDF or other electronic copies of your D&D products, particularly the core rulebooks?

Everyone in my group has a laptop computer, and we'd love to have easily searchable, electronic versions of the books to use during play. It'd be easier to carry around one PDA rather than all of the hardbound rulebooks, modules, and accessories. Something like the HTML help version of the 2d ed rulebooks that was available with the Core Rules CDROM would be nice.

 

[Greatwyrm]

I imagine the closest you'll get to this for quite some time is the SRD itself. If WotC actually put out .pdf versions of the books, the amount of piracy would probably be staggering. Of course, anymore you can find a copy of nearly any book on one of those file swapping engines within hours of release. Actually releasing the books in .pdf would just make it faster. Sad but true.

 

[trancejeremy]

Well, given that all WOTC products are apparently pirated anyway, I don't see what they have to lose.

Making an electronic version for sale is essentially found money. People who are honest (they do exist) will buy them.

 

[Cergorach]

Piracy: You'll find scanned copies of all the WotC products all over the net. The problem is that a lot of those are not OCRed, which is a lot of work. Scanned coppies are ussually big, and people with a low bandwith connection are usually hesitant to download big files. If WotC where to make pdfs available to buy they would be the OCRed variety, relatively small files that are easily distributed. That results in a big influx of pirated copies being distributed, that's bad for book sales. Lost book sales makes the retailer unhappy, makes the distributer unhappy, makes WotC unhappy.

 

[Staffan]

I don't think the core books will be sold as PDFs for quite some time (until 4e comes out or so). However, I would not be surprised to see PDFs of older material eventually being sold as ESDs, once it's been out of print for a while.

 

[MerakSpielman]

It is legal to take your own legitimate, payed for books and scan them yourselves. As long as you don't distribute the files to anybody. You just have to know how to make an OCRed pdf out of the scanned images.

 

[smetzger]

1) WOTC did this in the past, Core Rules 2 anyone? So its not entirely out of the question.

2) We have not gotten any hints that WOTC is planning on doing this in the forseable future.

3) They do release the SRD in electronic format.