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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
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.
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That's entirely possible, but from reading some discussion on the WotC boards I doubt it. The reason every single Star Wars Saga Edition book included an ad for Star Wars Minis was not for using them as an RPG aid, but as a separate and competing game. It turned out the brand manager was a SW Minis junkie and was doing everything she could to sell the RPG short.
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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.
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Depends upon gamers; I'm one of those guys who feels safest if I can have a print copy of everything, even if it means printing my PDFs and clipping them into a three- ring binder. For actual use at a game site, though, the e- reader is more convenient than carrying around a stack of huge notebooks.