Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I strongly suspect that it would not be economically feasible to sell eBook for a quarter the price of the printed book. Printing is a relatively small component of the price of a book; the main cost for a book such as this will be in the layout and editing, and that's there for an eBook just as much as for a hardback.
This is a company which has tried eBook sales and concluded that, for their market sector, piracy is too much of a problem. They do appear to be talking with the benefit of practical experience. One should blame the people who have pirated their books for this, not the company.
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It's very possible that WotC didn't decide this; they're now owned by Hasbro, which has interests so far outside the gamer-geek market that they're oblivious to the niche industry market forces.
They were making *some* money off PDFs. They are now making *no* money off PDFs. The availability of PDFs has not changed, just the source sites and the quality level.
Gaming books have always been prone to "one sale per gaming group." Not all books are that way, but it's very common for only one player to have a complete set of books, especially for college-age and younger gamers. Players expect to loan and borrow books within their group--and they expect to make copies of commonly-used pages, like character sheets and combat charts. Even groups where everyone has a copy of the hardcover books will run off multiple copies of important combat charts so they don't have to keep flipping to that page in the middle of the game session.
Refusing to release a legitimate digital version just means more pirate copies. And it's a really solid shoot-self-in-foot move, because gaming books are one of the few market niches that *can* effectively sell physical and digital copies to the same people--they want the physical book because no ebook reader is good at reference work & flipping between multiple pages quickly, and they want a searchable digital version to check specific details easily.