What would you pay for a book?

[FitzTheRuke]

I sell comics and RPGs for a living, so my opinion is based more on what I think my customers would pay rather than myself, so...

1) $20-25 USD
2) $40-50 USD
3) $60-80 USD
4) About 2/3 of the above.

While I personally sometimes buy PDFs, I don't sell them, so my opinion of them might not mean as much. (Also, I'm Canadian, but I put my prices up there in USD so it means more to you... though I guess I could have given it to you in pounds.)

As a note on #3... for us it pretty much NEEDS to come out to less than $100 CAD (about $79 USD right now, or no one is likely to buy it). It's a rule: "You break $100, you break the bank." (For this sort of product).

 

[Blue]

Think of it this way - he’s willing to pay for the content of the work.
I think a lot of people‘s approach to paying for PDFs would be very disheartening if I were a content producer. I mean here’s a format that they can produce where they can actually make decent money on it rather than have most of that potential sucked away by manufacture, distributors, and retailers (if they can sell directly enough)… and everyone wants a lowballed price.

You are not wrong, but let me state it another way.

There's a format that removes printing, shipping, distribution and final point-of-sale profit margins cuts from the cost, but doesn't deliver a physical product. The consumer wants some of that savings passed on to them.

Not saying how much they estimate the savings vs. the actual savings is right. Just the perception that printing and everything past that point is the majority of the cost. Someone who's actually done it can say if that is true or not.

 

[dragoner]

I can say here what I wrote on fb is that for A about $20, B&C less than $100, and for a pdf, usually around $20-30. I'm happy to get out of my local game store with spending less than $100, which isn't always easy.

 

[MGibster]

I think a lot of people‘s approach to paying for PDFs would be very disheartening if I were a content producer. I mean here’s a format that they can produce where they can actually make decent money on it rather than have most of that potential sucked away by manufacture, distributors, and retailers (if they can sell directly enough)… and everyone wants a lowballed price.

I don't typically concern myself with the welfare of the producer of what I'm purchasing. At least not at the point of sale. When I calculate the value of an item I want to purchase I typically look at it from my own utilitarian needs. In the abstract, yeah, I do want those who make the games I enjoy so much to be able to afford a decent standard of living. But that's not what I'm thinking about when I make that purchase.

My approach to PDFs is that I prefer physical books. So far as I'm concerned, the best thing PDFs offer over physical books is that they're cheaper. And 20% off the retail price of the book just doesn't cut it for me. As you said, they're not out distribution fees, printing, storage, and there's no risk of unsold inventory just sitting around. They can cut us a break of prices.

 

[The Green Hermit]

Following up on some of the later posts about RPG prices in the SKR salary thread.

What is the most you would you honestly pay for:

a) a softcover adventure (say 100 pages?)
b) a hardcover rulebook the size of the D&D core books (about 300 pages)
c) a hardcover rulebook the size of the Pathfinder core book (about 650 pages)
d) PDFs of each of the above

Note this isn’t what would you prefer the price was (free obvs!) but what would you honestly pay, assuming you wanted the product?

(If you’re not interested in that type of product assume you are for the purposes of the question)

Hardcover rulebook, around $50-75, depending on the size. I'm not currently interested in the adventure and I never want PDF's.

 

[aramis erak]

I don't typically concern myself with the welfare of the producer of what I'm purchasing. At least not at the point of sale. When I calculate the value of an item I want to purchase I typically look at it from my own utilitarian needs. In the abstract, yeah, I do want those who make the games I enjoy so much to be able to afford a decent standard of living. But that's not what I'm thinking about when I make that purchase.

My general metric is also self-centered... "How many player-hours of fun will this provide" and I figure that at $2 per hour. Prior to 5 years ago, In figured it at $1 per player-hour.... but I realized that the source of that (my 1987 rate of spending on favorite arcade games; I'd get 5 plays of Robotron for $1 (Tokens were 5 for a dollar) at my favorite arcade, and would generally have those 5 plays be most of an hour. Robotron was my best game in terms of fewest tokens per hour.) When I moved to oregon, I realized that I needed to up the value to match my stingy ebook buying. A newish novel costs me up to $10 - I seldom buy new in hardback, and mostly buy epub after the pocket paperback is out, and most of the epub prices are same as cheapest print format currently available... and books generally give me

I got my "breakeven" on Paleomythic from the read and reread alone...
On TOR 2E, I've gotten the player hours, but I had almost no fun...

 

[Dragonsbane]

Following up on some of the later posts about RPG prices in the SKR salary thread.

What is the most you would you honestly pay for:

a) a softcover adventure (say 100 pages?)
b) a hardcover rulebook the size of the D&D core books (about 300 pages)
c) a hardcover rulebook the size of the Pathfinder core book (about 650 pages)
d) PDFs of each of the above

Note this isn’t what would you prefer the price was (free obvs!) but what would you honestly pay, assuming you wanted the product?

(If you’re not interested in that type of product assume you are for the purposes of the question)

a) I never buy real books, but if I did $10
b) I never buy real books, but if I did $30
b) I never buy real books, but if I did $30

d) my actual price I spend on PDFs? $20 max. I find MANY DriveThruRPG products are almost as good as Paizo/MCG/WotC but for 1/4 the price.

Again, I might be a strange one. I make most of my own stuff and use SRD websites a great deal. I do have the Core D&D / Cypher / PF2 PHBs, but when I needed more material for my players I made a few books for DriveThru (one is silver yay!).

As a side note, I find companies who put out books/sets over $125 a little offensive to my strange grognard sensibilities and I tend to not get anything from those companies anymore (like D&D and MCG) as a matter of principle.

 

[jdrakeh]

Following up on some of the later posts about RPG prices in the SKR salary thread.

What is the most you would you honestly pay for:

a) a softcover adventure (say 100 pages?)
b) a hardcover rulebook the size of the D&D core books (about 300 pages)
c) a hardcover rulebook the size of the Pathfinder core book (about 650 pages)
d) PDFs of each of the above

Note this isn’t what would you prefer the price was (free obvs!) but what would you honestly pay, assuming you wanted the product?

(If you’re not interested in that type of product assume you are for the purposes of the question)

a) $25 (US)
b) $40 (US)
c) $60 (US)
d) $10, $20, $30 respectively.

 

[Blue]

a) I never buy real books, but if I did $10
b) I never buy real books, but if I did $30
b) I never buy real books, but if I did $30

d) my actual price I spend on PDFs? $20 max. I find MANY DriveThruRPG products are almost as good as Paizo/MCG/WotC but for 1/4 the price.

So, among those that do commision character art I've noticed that there's a big push not to undervalue yourself from the artist community. Artists new to commisioning sometimes way underprice themselves to get some customers, get some experience, and end up making a lot less than a livable salary. Spending 4 hours on a $10 work is not sustainable.

But an issue is that there's enough of these to recalibrate for some what they expect to pay. So what works out to be $10/hr for a bespoke piece - not an outrageous sum at all - gets seen as overinflated.

Virtual self-publishing and easy distribution lets anyone gets their ideas to market, and there's enough people out there that just by distribution some will be really good. But that doesn't mean that the prices reflect something that would sustain an industry. And without the industry, we don't have new editions. D&D easily could have had it's last published edition as AD&D 2nd from TSR, which also means no OGL and no Pathfinder-as-it-was.

This isn't saying you are doing anything wrong or to try to shame you. I'm pretty much assuming that you have bought core books, you just don't buy past that. I am just pointing out that there is value in supporting the industry, both large like WotC and Indie, to help our hobby as a whole move forward.

 

[BookTenTiger]

Following up on some of the later posts about RPG prices in the SKR salary thread.

What is the most you would you honestly pay for:

a) a softcover adventure (say 100 pages?)
b) a hardcover rulebook the size of the D&D core books (about 300 pages)
c) a hardcover rulebook the size of the Pathfinder core book (about 650 pages)
d) PDFs of each of the above

Note this isn’t what would you prefer the price was (free obvs!) but what would you honestly pay, assuming you wanted the product?

(If you’re not interested in that type of product assume you are for the purposes of the question)

1) $40
2) $60
3) $90
4) $30