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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barak" data-source="post: 3107020" data-attributes="member: 3028">To echo Kae'Yoss somewhat, I can't wrap my head around the idea that to prevent online retailers to become a monopsony (and yay! A new term), we should prevent them from competing fairly.  And by competing fairly, I mean allowing Amazon.Com to pass on the lower price they get the books for (by using volume or the fact that they get distributor prices) on to the customer.  That's basically price-fixing, which is a Bad Thing for the consumers.  It also confuses me that some of the companies that are the most vocal about the "evil" of Amazon.Com and other on-line retailers (but yeah, it's pretty much amazon) due to the damage they inflict on B&M stores tend to also be the most vocal proponents of books in PDF form.  Sure, at this point, PDFs are such a small market that they don't really hurt B&M much, but if they -do- become a Big Thing, they'll do much, much more damage to FLGS than online-sellers ever will, for rather obvious reasons.  So.. if B&M stores are such a vital, inherent need of the hobby as a whole, why promote the sale of PDFs so aggressively?I hear ya, but in my experience, which, of course, is merely anecdotal, those shops have mostly either closed or improved.  But even the shops with good service, clean floors and whatnot are suffering.  Stocking many lines is still an issue, but the thing here is that doing so often hurts the store more than it helps.  People -want- the store to offer lots of choice, but most people don't -buy- lots of different lines, and those unsold books hurt the bottom line a lot, so it's a lose-lose situation.Myself, I don't really care if all FLGS close.  They do me absolutely no direct good, so paying higher prices to help them out makes no direct sense.  The solution for the hobby as a whole (which I'd qualify as indirect good for myself) is not to artificially keep them in business, but to replace the good they do with something else.  The Internet has replaced many functions they used to have, and there's no reason why other ways of promoting the hobbies can't be found.</blockquote>

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