[Kuroshima]

There are many fronts open here. Obviously, Steve won't let GURPS die as long as it's not an unbearable loss making machine, but it needs to be economically viable, even if net profits per $ invested are lower than other SJG products. Phil is probably fighting the battle to keep it in place every day. FLGS are dying everywhere (here in Valencia, Spain, they still exist, but they're more often than not labors of love, as proved by the fact that the all eventually end up closing. The ones I grew with no longer exist, and the new ones are mainly comics/boardgames/MTG/Warhammer focused). I understand that SJG has a history of good retailer relationships that they don't wish to smear. It is certainly not a simple problem to solve.

Now, however, GURPS is mostly going digital. It's no longer on the store shelves anyway, because the physical product doesn't exist any more, for most of the word count. I have learnt to love digital formats (though I hate the PDF format, I understand why it's used*) because I can carry my entire library on my Nexus 7 everywhere. They're searchable, and

* PDF are unfit for purely digital consumption/distribution, and their only use should be as a temporary format for print, and as a stop-gap format for books normally scheduled for print but that you also want to release in digital form. Good digital formats are reflowable (and so discard the concept of page as an immutable thing), cross-linkable (PDFs can include internal links, but linking to other PDF files is still a mess of not very well supported implementations) and platform independent (PDFs are, for the most part, unless you happen to use some adobe specific features). They should let you process the text in any way you want (to enable use cases not originally though about by the original creator, such as turning them into alternate formats for editing), and accessible (meaning that they're easy to handle for those with disabilities. My eyesight is fine, but I understand that it's not the case for everyone. PDFs can be made accessible, by making them tagged pdfs, but AFAIK, they have their own issues [larger file sizes, slower to open, require extra work if the original source document wasn't created with accessibility in mind...]).