Weird Thing about pricing...

[JoeGKushner]

Just noticed that the Freedom City PDF is out for $19.95. When you consider that the hardcover book is going to be $39.95, that doesn't seem too bad.

However, when you consider that a lot of online vendors will probably be selling that for $28.00, it gets a little worse.

Must be a strange situation to have to price a PDF so that it doesn't compete with the print version, especially as the prince version's M.S.R.P. isn't followed by many online retailors.

 

[Crothian]

People have been complaining about this for a while, but the RPG companies cannot control what other places sell thier books for.

 

[Voadam]

I can usually get a mongoose print book cheaper than a pdf version since they generally are about 30% off the cover price for the pdf. I can usually get a comparable page length pdf book on a similar topic for much less from other companies. And there are a ton of good pdfs that are much cheaper (50% off cover or more). It is why I haven't gotten any mongoose ones since they went to dtrpg.com. Even though I like their books and the subject matter of many of them I get much more bang for my buck buying ones from other companies that I am interested in.

Fantasy Flight Games is getting a lot of my monthly gaming budget with their $5 legends and lairs sales.

 

[Geoff Watson]

Most companies want to sell their books. The pdfs are just an afterthought for those people who can't get the books. They don't want the pdfs to reduce sales of the books, so the pdfs aren't that cheap.

Geoff.

 

[Pinotage]

Sometimes in pdf you get absolute gems like the recent Tome of Horrors release - $10 for 450 pages of monster greatness (not goodness, greatness!). pdfs are funnily price in general.

Pinotage

 

[Kelleris]

So what's a reasonable price per page for a pdf? For one that also exists in print (hardbound or perfect bound)? I'm kinda wondering this myself as I try to figure out why my book is priced the way it is ($10.95 for 165 pages, or ~6-7 cents per page). Some mention was made of a reluctance to go beyond a 10-dollar price point on general principles, but I'm not sure what that amounts to.

 

[Bloodstone Press]

IMO, PDFs should be priced based on word count, not page count.

When pricing by word, there is a curve. Long books with 50,000+ words usually have a lower per word cost than shorter titles (5,000 words).

 

[Kelleris]

That makes sense. What's a good price per word, then? Maybe like 1/75 to 1/100 of a cent?

 

[Ranger REG]

Just noticed that the Freedom City PDF is out for $19.95. When you consider that the hardcover book is going to be $39.95, that doesn't seem too bad.

However, when you consider that a lot of online vendors will probably be selling that for $28.00, it gets a little worse.

Must be a strange situation to have to price a PDF so that it doesn't compete with the print version, especially as the prince version's M.S.R.P. isn't followed by many online retailors.

Well, the "S" in MSRP did mean "suggested."

 

[jdrakeh]

PDF pricing varies a lot depending on the publisher. Some publishers lower the price of their PDF files and try to move volume, others raise their PDF prices and try to push quality, and still others are all over the map with no apparent standard pricing scheme at all. It's still a new market, utlimately - I think that it'll be a while before there is a 'PDF industry' standard for pricing.