Let me start off by saying that I think the growth of PDFs have done considerable good for the industry.

First and foremost, there's no doubt that they've allowed a lot of good material to be published that wouldn't otherwise be available. Small publishers have been able to get into the business and see whether there's an audience for their products. I think the indie community had been particularly helped by the ease, cheapness, and speed of PDF production. But, even large companies have shared in the benefits, putting out PDF adventures and other support products that might not have sold sufficiently to warrant print publication (and that of course means that their customers are benefited as well).

I'm very happy that RPGnet has a long-term and notable relationship with DriveThruRPG, as I think the two sites are flip sides of the electronic future of our gaming medium.

Mind you, I still prefer print copies myself. I like having a wall of materials for Traveller, Ars Magica, RuneQuest and my other favorites in my office, so that I can pull down a book and read it at my ease, so that I know they'll still be there ten years from now no matter how many different computers I buy, and no matter how much the formats change. Given that I've had some of the games on my shelf for twenty-five years, I don't think that's an unreasonable desire, and given how many files I've lost on past computers--mainly because I decided they weren't particularly important--I don't think the loss of electronic PDFs is an unreasonable fear.

Fortunately, I can somewhat assuage some of the downsides when using PDFs. I can choose to print out just a few pages that are relevant for a play session (as I've done at various times with monster books and encounter books) and I can choose to print and bind a full book for longer-term use (though the options for this are scanter than I'd like at the moment and the costs higher, but I expect that to change in as little as the next year or two).

However, there's one place that I think PDFs seriously fail us right now, and it's one that I find very frustrating: the lack of secondary markets.

Second Markets & RPGs

Over the last several months, I've been completing my collection of Traveller RPG books and fiction, buying up books from GDW, Judges Guild, FASA, New Infinities Productions, and others--most of which have been out-of-print for twenty or twenty-five years.

For the more common items, it's been pretty easy to do. Primarily through eBay and Amazon, I've made numerous purchases, in many cases at prices cheaper than the original costs for the books. That's pretty cool for long out-of-print books in a niche hobby.

Sadly, as PDFs become more popular, we'll become less and less able to access these products from our past. The reason is the aforementioned lack of secondary markets. You can't go out and get a used copy of a PDF at Amazon. You can't stumble across one at a garage sale. If a publisher takes a PDF out of print--possibly due to a licensing issue, possibly because he feels that it no longer represents his company--there's practically no way to get a legal copy of it anymore.

This isn't a legal problem, per se. By the First Sale Doctrine, when you purchase copyrighted material, you have the ability to later transfer the item you bought. This is why libraries and used-book stores are legal--as much as publishers have wanted to get rid of them at various time.

Instead the problem with PDFs has technological and social causes. The technological problem is that electronic files can be easily and losslessly copied. The social problem is that lots of people think this is OK. The end result is that you can't practically purchase a PDF from a past owner because there's no way to guarantee that the PDF is being transferred rather than copied.

And so the currently unfolding history of our hobby lies in danger of disappearing entirely. I've recently reviewed a few fine Traveller products, including The Bowman Arm and Datrillian that would be largely relevant to people running games with Mongoose's current Traveller system--but which can no longer be purchased because the license under which Comstar produced them has expired and because there are no secondary markets.

I think that's a crying shame.

Is DRM the Answer?

When I ask the question, "Is DRM the answer?" I suspect that the resounding--nay deafening--answer is, "No!" And, I understand that response, because DRM has been used for evil in the years since the term came into common use.

I don't want corporations using DRM to restrict the rights that I naturally should have under copyright. I don't want them to restrict my fair-use copying. I want to be able to access my media at the time and using the format of my choosing.

I especially don't want idiots like Microsoft and Yahoo! to encode my media with DRM that will make it unusable when they stop offering the service (or go out of business or whatever). And I'm still aghast that Amazon would use their DRM to erase content that their customers had paid for. Shame on them.

But I'm afraid that privacy and rights advocates have thrown out the electronic baby with the bathwater. With a DRM system you could offer a way for customers to certifiably transfer electronic media--like PDFs. And that would naturally create a secondary market for PDFs, so that out-of-print would no longer mean gone-forever-from-legal-markets.

It would take work to do it right. You'd need to have some type of third-party foundation that could give out keys to multiple publishers. Maybe you'd even need some sort of peer-to-peer system, that would never be subject to the whims (and viability) of a single company; it might be able to use some sort of public-key cryptography to verify ownership--and transfers.

The specifics are beyond me, but I wish that someone were looking into them, because if not, in another ten or fifteen years, we're going to find that a lot of the history of our media--for that matter, a lot of the history of every niche medium--is either unavailable or available only in black markets.

By then it might be too late to correct the problem with PDFs.

Final Notes

This is not intended as an argument about piracy, nor is it intended as an argument about DRM as it's been used to date. Please don't make it about either issue.

It is, instead, a discussion of a serious problem that doesn't get much discussion: the disappearing PDFs. I'd love to hear talk about that issue and about how it could be solved--by DRM or by other means.