D&D Books Go PDF

According to an article I caught on Slashdot, you’ll soon be able to download Dungeons & Dragons books as PDFs. At first, I thought it was great news. After all, you can get the book instantly and have it available for searching from your computer. If you’re a savvy DM with a laptop, it’s a convenient way to have many books open at once without cluttering up the gaming table. Sure, it’s not as nice as having the hard copy in your hand, but it still has some advantages.

Unfortunately, the spirit of T$R is alive and well. The PDFs will be sold at the same cost as the hard copies, in which case most will go for $30 or more. Naturally, they will also feature tight access protection, which will do nothing to deter hackers and will only serve to frustrate most users.

I understand that the people behind Dungeons & Dragons are in business to make money. That’s perfectly acceptable. Still, when you sell the same product in a new format for huge savings in production and distribution, but do so for the same price as the original, that’s just plain greedy. Nobody expects all of the savings to go to the loyal consumers, but some discounting is in order.

Unfortunately, utilities like BitTorrent and LimeWire still allow users to share files freely, not the least of which being PDFs. It’s a shame they’re doing it this way, then, since a little price break could go a long way toward convincing people to buy the legal PDF than to download an illegal copy for free.

With any luck, Wizards of the Coast will come to its senses and lower the price. Otherwise, I expect we’ll see plenty of cracked copies circulating around for free as the price continues to go up in response to lower sales.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 5th, 2006 at 6:07 am and is filed under Tabletop RPGs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.