Interesting — I didn’t know that. I assumed there were differences, but that there was still something convertible-to-PDF involved. I guess that’s why WotC went with manually-scanned ESDs for all of their older products, which makes sense.

Piracy is a tricky one. Much like ancient video games that are no longer supported, I don’t see most RPG companies getting too upset if folks pirate games from the 80s — but in-print stuff is definitely a different situation.

And if more companies made time for the Lulu/PDF approach to their back catalogue — even if there isn’t all that much money in it in many cases — then folks who don’t currently have a legitimate way to get those products would have another option.

What interests me more is to what extent people are going to adopt things like Lulu. Print on demand has the potential to really blow open opportunities in the pen-and-paper industry, but will it end up being successful or will it just result in another 3.0-style boom of products in the market that ultimately comes to be regarded as kind of a negative thing?

I spent about 100 dollars a year on gaming books before pirating, nowadays I spend around 600 dollars. The same “ratios” can be said for movies and music – sure, I might pirate alot more than what I really buy, but that is because I want to own QUALITY material. I see my downloads not as something I would’ve bought ANYWAY, but as a preview copy – I read up on a recently released book and judge if it’s worth buying or not.

A friend once tracked down scanned PDFs of the collected articles on Call of Cthulhu, from the "pre-catalogue" days of White Dwarf, as well as OOP sourcebooks like Gaslight—Limewire is apparently a bounty of RPG material. Neither Games Workshop, nor Chaosium, could really be expected to lose money from their out-of-print products being fileshared; they benefit as good product remains in circulation, at no cost to themselves.

I feel differently with regard to in-print RPG books, however, as there’s not a huge amount of money in the industry; unlike (say) the music industry, producers, writers and LGSs could stand to lose out big-time. If you care about the roleplaying industry—I believe—and you find an in-print product that you want to own, save up and buy a copy, or go without until you can.

As a roleplayer and a collector, I know how much it hurts when you can’t buy The Latest Sourcebook, but it’s not something you need. And one of the great things about the hobby is that it’s reasonably easy to roll-your-own.

After all, RPGs are all about imagination and creativity, aren’t they?

just my 2cp, value it as you will.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t condone using a pirated PDF in lieu of the original book or legit PDF. But there are times when the original book is very expensive or impossible to find, and no official PDF was made. (“Greyhawk – From the Ashes” is a great example, as are some of the more obscure games.)

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/23/0343231

The one problem with those PDFs is they are not print quality. They are probably at 72 dots per inch, which looks horrible when printed. Having something at least at 150 makes it look “decent”, but you really really really need something at 300 dpi to make it look ok. Even then some truly detailed high quality art can come out grainy. When we upload to Lulu we have to do it through their FTP server, and that is just with the beta edition of our book. The images in there are compressed to 72 dpi (for space), and they don’t look good. In a final product that wouldn’t cut it. Of course, it is a better option for some companies doing OOP books, than investing the money into reproducing. Still, one copy of the book, a high power scanner, a trained monkey and some cleanup of the scanned images, can produce something print worthy from an old book. It’s not going to be as high quality, but it’ll be serviceable.

I guess that is the thing. With an OOP market, much like with rare videos or audio files, people are willing to accept a little bit of loss of quality to get something that is perceived of as rare.

I think a truly great way for POD on OOP books to evolve in is to install one of the Print on Demand kiosks they are developing in gaming stores, and then print OOP books out with a percentage of the profits going to the FLGS. The FLGS gets some cash, the publisher gets some cash, the user gets the older book they want.

better yet, print + PDF.