What Makes Gaming Books as PDFs Desirable?

[IronWolf]

I found some reference in an article over on CNN.com:

"E-books made up about 8.5 percent of all book sales, according to the report, up from less than 3 percent for the same time period last year."

So, in some sense, it is amazing growth - it seems ebook sales were up 207%. Any time you see amazing growth, you have to wonder if it will be sustained. Lots of folks may have bought Kindles and iPads, but that doesn't mean that use will continue in the long term.

Agreed. Nedjer has a good point that some of that could be the initial "loading up of ebooks" on people's new iPad's and Kindles. It is quite possible that will not be sustained.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

 

[Mark CMG]

I'd love the hard number totals, too, but a relative statement doesn't require that particular context to avoid being meaningless.

 

[nedjer]

I will likely eat these words in a few more years as bandwidth continues to increase (i.e. some of us live in rather rural areas and our broadband is falling behind the city folk) and computing speeds continue to increase, but I don't think I want a lot of interactivity in my PDF files. I like being able to search them and I like a bookmarked table of contents. I don't really want embedded videos and such.

PDF forms for character sheets are well and good, but I can find those for most systems I play, so I don't feel I am lacking for that either.

Hopefully there will be continued improvements, but for the moment there are still certain sites that work better in one browser versus another.

I don't have much desire to make any of these modifications. I don't have any PDFs where I think I can do a better job formatting than the original designer. And I'd rather spend my time reading and prepping for a game than re-editing the sourcebook I am using.

I don't make enough house rules to warrant this. Typically it is easier for me to just create an appendix if I am going to make house rules and add it as an additional file to note these changes. I don't house rule a lot though.

Likely it just sounds like our usage patterns vary significantly with you wanting to customize sourcebooks when they are released whereas I treat them more like actual books that I wouldn't necessarily be customizing either.

Good point for having your cake and eating it to. *If* the conversion from html to PDF can handle creating the PDF with bookmarks and retain the find functionality. Otherwise the conversion process stripped a lot of what was of value to the PDF format, which currently is my preferred format.

I sincerely hope there'll be a crunchy and fluffy, rules medium to heavy AD&D 7.0e in luxurious, unblemished hardback with tons of quality artwork.

Just not sure such things will happen if there aren't more RPG players, which means offering easy paths into TRPGs, lowering or removing entry costs, making TRPGs customisable and making the market open to micro-monetisation

I'm talking in terms of adding choice and giving players complete control from stripped-down minimalist to 'fancy' styling. Videos or links to videos showing rules being explained, good play, 'the 2012 campaign' or other personal content might appeal to some. Can't say I use it but I do like to stripe the tables and shown white text on black like here. I've also replaced the illustrations with art from Wikimedia Commons. If it was my kind of thing I might pay to put in images from a WotC artist or for a Halloween styling for one night a year.

A great many players won't want to complete the few steps involved in doing that themselves. But stick a button on the page to change fonts and settings, or reduce it to a quick 'drag' or install routine, and people with different preferences and visual requirements will often want to choose their own settings.

One browser against another is not a problem so long as the source, i.e. the basic game, is html, css and svg W3C web standards compliant.

This goes beyond the soucebook. Talking also in terms of taking that 'art pack' I made or bought (saw a Final Fantasy image pack app along similar lines recently) and use it to decorate my character sheets or stick it on a card to 'flesh out' the introduction of a new NPC. The concept goes beyond the rules, which is why Treasure comes with all its artwork. Few people are going to put lots of graphics into their games if they have to start from scratch. And we still need to go on and make the artwork accessible by delivering pre-styling of the artwork, so it's easy to get the images just as you like.

The Traveller SRD or 3.5 are open to similar approaches but Treasure is good to go, i.e. how easy is quick, editable (in your word processor) conversion of Treasure html to PDF?

Open html in Word 2007
Save as .docx

30 secs

Remove a couple of awkward images too large for page
Add a couple of line breaks
Copy working copy of TOC with working links and paste over copy at bottom
Save
Save as PDF
Check PDF (if any images scroll to repaginate cleanly)

5 minutes start to finish – functional, linked PDF of v1.4 on my desktop. Even the interactive charts seem to link, (but look for a local html copy as set).

OpenOffice is pretty much the same: into swriter, .odt format and avoid PDF/ A default and you have to put the table borders back in.

More editing in the word processor would improve layout before burning. Suddenly our clumsy copy and paste from a PDF (formatting collapsed) is an easily customised word processor document and you can burn selections or copies as PDFs with ease.

Overall, a lot of access/ options, as it doesn't get much easier than editing in a word processor. Here it is teh result. The only currently published pdf version straight from the word file. When it's that easy to customise . . .

 

[diaglo]

What Makes Gaming Books as PDFs Desirable?

nothing?


i hate pdfs. but if they are the only way i can get OD&D(1974) back in print so be it.

 

[drothgery]

So, in some sense, it is amazing growth - it seems ebook sales were up 207%. Any time you see amazing growth, you have to wonder if it will be sustained. Lots of folks may have bought Kindles and iPads, but that doesn't mean that use will continue in the long term.

Well, I haven't bought anything in print that I could get an acceptable electronic version of since I bought a Kindle (though since I'm a 4e fan and gaming-book sized PDFs usually have Issues on a Kindle, I haven't gone that route for gaming books yet). I may, just maybe, make an exception for the last couple of Wheel of Time novels (since I have hardcovers of the rest); that was my original plan. But I'm really wavering on that.

 

[AJCarrington]

For me the biggest issue is portability. I like the Physical books and buy them. But usually the are kept at the house and consist of reading material. I usually never game at my house but because of the way my group works usually need a lot of the books at gaming. I have way to many to easily carry. Pdfs are so much easier on the back.

Pretty much mirrors my opinion to a tee. One difference for me is that I travel a lot for work and it's far easier to transport the PDFs with me than my books...would hate to see the size of that carry-on.

AJC