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#1 roxlimn Feb 07, 2009 6:35:44

Well. I've been putting off making this thread commentary for a long time because frankly, I've been too chicken to make it. However, a recent severe health crisis has moved me to reconsider. If I don't do this now, I may never be able to do it. What's this all about? Piracy. Ebooks. This: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2009/02/the-once-and-future-e-book.ars It's a somewhat technical paper that briefly relates how the fears of the publishing world have largely and long delayed the success of the ebook. Being an avid reader, I've long expected it and nothing of note has come. I think it's time someone mentioned it on a public forum where the customers of a publishing company are listening, and where said company is WotC, I feel that it's going to fall on fertile soil. Peer to peer piracy is unstoppable. It can't be prevented, it can't be policed. This is how things are now. The music industry went down fighting, but it's going down. Smart music retailers like Apple use the inexpensive nature of the internet and software to their advantage rather than fight the inevitable. You have to wonder why anyone would bother to buy any tune from Apple when they could get the same pirated copy for free from some peer to peer program and the answer is, of course, ridiculously simple: People want to pay for good products. Everyone has a job and they understand that if the artist can't make a living making the music they like, she's going to stop and wait on tables instead. This is not rocket science. Stupid people understand this. We already HAVE your books and your programs and your games and your music. We want to pay you because we think they're great and we want you to continue making them. Please let us pay you. You know how JK Rowling isn't authorizing the PDF sale of an electronic copy of her books? Well it doesn't matter. Electronic copies of her books are ubiquitous. I have a copy. In order to pay her for it, I've had to purchase ANOTHER set of hard bound copies of her book because there is currently no easily available venue for paying her. That sucks. What the heck am I going to do with all these extra copies? And I killed a tree, too. And the PDF format is hard to read on a PDA and iTouch. I am not alone. There are millions like me who regularly download all manner of free crap from the internet who wish we could properly pay the right guys to make more of this stuff that we like. Apple gives us a venue for music, and now ebooks. Yes, I pay Apple for classics I can easily find for free in the library. So sue me. I like ebooks on my iPod. While this trend has already seen some reflection in eReader stores (and yes, I have an account there, too), I feel that publishers in general have been slow in promoting e-reading material because they fear that it will have an impact on their much less efficient paperback and hardcopy sales. Insane? You tell me. Much of what goes into the pricing of a hardcopy PHB goes into printing and distribution. YOU DON'T HAVE TO PAY FOR THAT IF YOU RELEASE IT IN EBOOK FORM. You hear that WotC? More profits for you. I want to give you my money. Please take my money. I know that a PDF version of the PHB already exists. Frankly, that's crap. You can only ever read a PDF on a small PDA screen and not very well at that, and it's not hyperlinked at all. In short, it's NOT formatted like an e-manual, which it should be. It'll take more development, I suppose, but I'd pay for that. I'd pay up to $10 for a for-iTouch version of the PHB and $2 each a month a copy of Dungeon and Dragon for my iPod. How can this possibly work? Well, let's look at Stardock, publisher of downloaded games like Sins of a Solar Empire and Galactic Civilization 2, of which I have multiple licenses. Their piracy protection is laughable. Weak and ineffectual. That said, GalCiv2 and SofSE are some of the harder to find pirated software on the internet. Why? Certainly not from DRM. Is it because the software is too niche? I don't believe so. I can find pirated copies of Xcom 1 on the net faster - and that's pretty darned obscure. This is not to say that there isn't any torrent for this game on the net, but by and large, it's an excellent game for its audience, and the download price is reasonable. Therefore, more people want to (and can) pay Stardock for its efforts. This price easily matches the pirated price of not having reliable software, reliable updates, and possibly frying your hardware, not to mention viruses and the like. Simple economics - the "cheaper" legal alternative wins. Generally speaking, DRM is crap. To date there exists no DRM in the world that can't be cracked. Spore was famously pirated. So was Harry Potter. In terms of real efficacy, they're all functionally the same - worthless. We all know how the 3 cores were available on the net before they were published. If you ask me, they only improved the sales of the books - because the rules were that excellent and people wanted to pay for excellent product. And because hardbound books are the chief and only table game-aid in terms of manuals that WotC has yet to produce. Please don't stop the production of a D&D e-distribution network because of fears of piracy. If it can be pirated and there's demand - it will. Nothing will stop that, or facilitate that more than already exists. Please don't stop the production of a D&D e-distribution network because of fears it will erode the sales of hardcopies. It's more efficient for the publisher anyway, and books will always be valued as game-aids at the table. You already release your mags in eformat. You have the foresight and the proof that this works. Please DO look into e-distribution of D&D books. Not the cheap, overly-expensive PDF crap, nor the plausible but unlikely DDI e-tools. Millions of people have the iPhone, the iTouch, or at the very least a tabletop or laptop computer. Make a manual for us. I'll pay you a reasonable amount for it. Pretty please?