I do not buy long PDFs. Short stuff that's catchy-- paper minis, neat maps, gloss, mini adventures, neat concept pieces-- those are great for PDF. In fact, they're not worth selling as a print product, I'll balk at paying $10 for 4 print pages but will pay the same for it in PDF form. So I avidly buy short PDF stuff. PDFs for gaming are a great way to increase the audience, not alienate. Except long PDFs suck.

First, let's calibrate my tastes so you get a sense of whether I'm a worthwhile customer. I'll buy most any game or comic product under $15 that strikes my fancy. If it's over $20, I'll want a review. Over $30, I start to balk unless it's on my 'highest priority' list. I'll happily go over $30 for an RPG book if it's a gift for someone else, though.

So my most recent PDF purchase fits my usual pattern, as I just blew $30 on a printed copy of a PDF RPG as a gift. It's an amazing book ("The Noble Wild"), I'd just played in two Con game sessions run by the author himself, much fun was had by all. A more sure sell would be harder to find. And yet I nearly didn't buy the $8 176-page PDF because it was too #$%^ing long. $8! And I nearly balked at what should have been a sure sell. If it had been 16 pages, I'd have bought it-- that it was 176 pages was nearly the show stopper. Had it not been as a gift, I would have walked away. Long PDFs are a pain.

Having committed to getting it, I now set about trying to get it into useful form. To wit, a book. That's the source of my hesistancy-- I don't like buying products that arrive in unusable form, that cost more to assemble then they cost to buy. It'd be like paying $10K for a car that required $20K in work by a mechanic to drive-- you're better off just skipping that hassle.

<anti-DRM rant>Worse, many PDFs are hard to print via low-cost online services in a futile anti-piracy attempt. Result: honest customers like me give up on printing them and stop buying, while the pirates do what they want with nary a speed bump (because they have the time and tools to make protections meaningless).</anti-DRM rant>

Anyway, here's my PDF breakdown for the game I plan to give as a gift:

• Purchase cost: $8
• Printing cost: $22

A little accounting geekery here. Assuming the publisher gets half of the PDF, that's $4 made. For print books, 20% is a typical margin, so that's 20% of $30, $6. The publisher 'lost' $2 in potential money but saved themselves the hassles (and risks) of selling a paper product, which ordinarily would be a good deal for the publisher. But...

I don't buy long PDFs. The only ones I've bought have been to give as gifts. So they're not making $4/copy selling to an RPGer, they're making $4/copy selling to the subset of RPGers that are buying the items to print out and give as gifts to other people. I don't think that's a large market.

I'm told the better selling PDFs are in the 1,000-4,000 word range. Basically, the 4-8 pagers. Looking at my PDF collection, yeah, I agree, those are the ones I'll buy for my own use. At 8 pages, I can print it, staple one corner, and not feel ripped off.

$8 for 176 pages is not a good deal, it's a logistics disaster. There are those who like it because they can access their games via laptop. One GM did this to good effect at last weekend's Con... until his laptop battery died mid-session. Fortunately, he'd written the book and ran the rest from memory. I'd wager the market segment of 'creators who prefer their own work in PDF' is also not a lucrative audience to tap, though.

Worse, it was a hassle. I had to wait in line at Kinkos, and only ended up there because my attempts to print via Lulu.com failed. The worse kind of failure, the type where you don't know why, so you end up waiting for their help support and getting a 'try again later' response because they couldn't figure it out, and only by trying different formats could I eventually get an error message clueing me in. Apparently the PDF was protected, so they wouldn't touch it. I don't like wasting time-- had it not been a gift, I'd have skipped it and never bought another long PDF again. This "print it yourself" totally fails for me.

But the title of this is "but I buy them anyway", and that still stands. And there's a happy ending-- well, happy for the rest of you. Skirmisher Press decided (quite independent of my rant) to start offering their books in print via Lulu.com. The price for "Noble Wild"? $19.86 plus shipping.

There's an argument that, if you print the (higher cost higher risk) book and also offer the PDF, pirates will just share the PDF and you'll lose sales. That's kind of irrelevant to the print-on-demand (POD) bit I'm suggesting here, because PDF pirates will start pirating as soon as you offer the PDF. I'm not suggesting that companies producing print books also offer a PDF (which likely can increase piracy), I'm suggesting PDF publishers: 1) make it easier for people to get their product in book form, and also 
2) profit more from their work (rather than letting Kinkos get the revenue)

Potential Audience for an RPG:

1. People who prefer PDFs
2. People who make do with PDFs but prefer books
3. People who buy only PDFs to print as books
4. People who only buy books
5. People who never buy books but pirate PDFs

Segments 1, 2 and 3 are the current PDF market. Segment 5 will never be. If you add DriveThruPOD, you can get segments 2-4 without losing segment 1 or increasing negative segment 5. So POD+PDF=more money. It's a simple equation, and I am insanely happy that Skirmisher figured it out on their own. Let's hope the industry follows suit.

Until next month,
Sandy