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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rasyr" data-source="post: 1776179" data-attributes="member: 2855">What makes you think that they haven't been trying to sell it already? Then again, not many companies are going to be willing to pay approximately 30 million for something that WotC has effectively given away for free. Or for something that they don't own the movie rights to (and possibly the electronic game right - although they may have gotten those back now).To me, WotC's tentative steps into the pdf market via DTRPG, and pricing identical to MSRP seems more like that they are trying to prove to themselves that the PDF market won't work more than anything else.Correct! All those costs still have to be met, but also remember that companies do not sell products to distributors and stores at full price either, but rather at approximately 40%-60% of cover price. Those companies that sell their physical books online do so at cover price because of the retailers for the most part. If they did not, the retailers would stop carrying their products (Amazon and other deep discounters are another thorn in the retailer's side and one that they have been complaining about for years).I know that the company I work for sells PDFs for 50%-60% of cover price, and that we sell them like hotcakes. This still gives us approximately the same profit margin as selling a physical book, thus we make about the same (more actually, since there is no printing figured into the expenses for it). So PDFs can be a viable source of revenue, but it has to be done correctly.When we first released HARP as a PDF, I asked a couple of PDF publishers what sort of numbers would constitute a PDF being a success. The number I was given for sales in the first 3 months is less than the number of copies we sold in that first week (we almost broke those numbers over that first weekend, but were shy by about 10%)Since then, all of our PDFs have sold very well.....I think that you are correct here, that it will be both. The final form for this has yet to be determined though. I know that we are looking at (once our new shopping cart is online) at bundling print and PDF copies of books together as a value pack type of deal, along with several other ideas we have cooking.The next 5 - 10 years is going to be a time of change and growth for the rpg industry, and companies will have to change if they want to be able to compete effectively.And in just a few months there will be at least one publisher who prints his own books in-house, ICE. The technology is there already for the printing of books (soft covers at least). ICE will be getting that technology (boss making a final inspection at a book store that does print books in-store later this week, and then about 6-8 weeks for it to be installed in our offices).  The possibilities of this technology are astounding. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />I am not sure about that, although returns only happen through distributors who deal with the bookstore chains, and not the regular hobby distributors. Returns are a pain in the rear though and create all sorts of accounting headaches and so forth. It is possibly a factor, but I am just not sure of how much of one.On the other hand, a greater cause for the increase in the prices of books is the fact that while printing technologies have gotten better and less expensive, printing costs (for publishers) do not. This, I think, is a greater cause of increased prices over the years.</blockquote>

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