Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

PDF works for free on all the platforms I use. Can the same be said for youe ePub?
As for the price point, most new supplements are under $10 I really dont think that is a bad price point. Nor do I think its expensive enough that volume would significantly increase, much less enough to offset the costs for a higher profit ratio for all involved.

As to the software thing, really Apple? They are infamous for being a failure in that regard. Too much hassle to get most developers to be happy working with them, which is why Android has passed them by for phones and working on tablets.
And another issue is the sheer volume difference. If you build software you have to cover your SDK, equipment, licensing and training time as intangible costs plus the time to write it and then sell and promote it. This results in very expensive software if you do it each custom but you can sell many copies then you can spread some of that cost around for a lower selling price.
Same with publishing. But you have to figure out the volume and if the volume drops too low then you cant make money without charging more.

Unfortunately you have a lot of people who somehow think electronic means cheap or free becasue they do not understand all the costs involved.

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

They are going to fail. I iTunes and music because you can play the song on more than then iPod that you buy. Apples /prportiyy/ fork of the open epub format LOCKS the publisher in so that they can only be read on Apple devices. That means even if the successively modify the epub format to actully satifies the needs of the reference book market the publish STILL needs to use a separably layout process signification increasing there cost or abandoned support for anything non iOS ro MacOS, that means Android which is out selling them is a closed market to those publisher, so is the PC, Linux, and Windows Mobiles. Which also means abandoning e32.

Oh and even if the publisher considers that risk worth taking and puts all the eggs into a product that will only work on Apple producets, Apple still resved the right to deny you access the iBooks store on any grounds they wish, like like Itunes and Apps store, so all you development can be down the drain before the customer ever get to see your product.

Oh here the other thing the differences Itunes worked because broke the barrier need to buy online songs... Book publishers haven't created such a tight noose as the RIAA had for online sales for iBooks to have the demaned to push iPad back on top and mae publishers /need/ to get on the ban wagon.

If you want a publisher to watch to see whee the referring book market jumper with electronic publishing watch O'Reilly Books. a major References book publisher with close ties computer industry and an owner dedicated to invitation.

http://shop.oreilly.com/category/cus...vice/ebooks.do

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

Assuming your platforms include any of the following, yes: Mac OSX, Linux, Windows 2K through 8, Android, iOS, Sony Reader (600 and later), Nook.

Calibre will serve most of your needs on the laptop/desktop side... and will convert many formats into other formats for your favorite devices.

As for iOS and Android, lots of choices. Your service provider may have locked out some in the Android Market, tho.

http://www.goomedic.com/20-epub-read...d-mac-osx.html


The one problem with ePub is tables. A workaround is (much like web BBS forums) to use monospaced fonts and careful use of underscores to pad out data.

And it likely failed for being a niche producer within the niche market. I only got things from them via bundles... I was certainly underwhelmed by the content.

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

...which is precisely what SJ Games is, which I believe is Kromm's point.

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

Also, GURPS had books which could be viewed in black and white and organized into numbered paragraphs for easy reflowing and navigation (although it didn't chose to number them that way). It gave them up when it went over to 4e, because their marketing research said that pretty books on good paper would do better than plain books on rough paper. They also moved away from rules that require anything more advanced than a few arithmetic operations to calculate, so I think references like "see Low Tech §99-113" would scare away more readers even if they made it easier to read GURPS on a Kindle.

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

Case numbering is simply ugly. We have polled people about it before . . . there's always a significant grognard vote in favor of it, and always a much larger "Holy hell, no!" vote against it. Most people don't want RPGs to read like the General Income Tax and Benefit Guide 2011 (I mean, once you read to p. 12 or so). Thus, for now, the desire to be able to exploit POD if the costs become favorable means that we'll be sticking with absolute page numbers. And that plus our desire for tables to be pretty, typeset things without ugly monospaced fonts and underscores means that we'll be sticking with PDF for the foreseeable future.

I tend to agree. I was a faithful user of the iPhone and customer of the iTunes Store for years. Eventually, I realized that even the higher-end Android phones cost less – my wife and I got two of the latest, greatest Samsung phones and a 10.1" tablet for the price of one iPhone 4S, which simply wasn't available at couples-plan promotional pricing because Apple didn't deem that a goal in our region, while Samsung doesn't try to tell telecom companies what deals they can offer. And the Android phones are self-evidently faster and more capable than my friend's 4S. The last straw was the iTunes Store being jerks about letting me play the music I had paid for on my Android phone . . . no, they wanted to dictate my platform.

So I can't say that I see Apple as a shining beacon of good business sense, and I do not push to follow in their tracks. The online retailer I admire most is Valve's Steam Store. Whenever SJ Games asks me for my input or vote, it's in the direction of being more Steam-like, not more iTunes-like.

That was indeed my point. The pen-and-paper RPG business is already a tiny, diminishing niche. Within it, there are a couple of titans, and then there's SJ Games. We're big in the realm of card and dice games, and are making headway on board games, but we're not an RPG giant; that side of our business is smaller than it once was, and "niche within a niche" describes the GURPS situation well. For most purposes, GURPS is produced by about four people on a neglible budget. It can afford to hold its course, but not to engage in adventures in formatting and distribution.

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

Are there programs that will take the text out of one format and dump it into another? Of course.

Do those programs do so well, maintaining even such trivial-to-convert things as boldface, italic, and section breaks? In my experience, no. I actually bought a Kindle primarily to avoid the hassle of converting legally-purchased Kindle-exclusive content over to something I could put on my Kobo; the cash outlay for the device outweighed the hassle of conversion for me.

And I manage a big website for a living...

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

Not to sidetrack the conversation, but I've never seen that much advanced math required, even in 3e GURPS. The only books that even required me to pull out the calculator were Vehicles and Space -- the latter mainly for calculating a planet's year-length and doublechecking its gravity. (And I'm a newspaper reporter, so my math skills are ... basic, to be kind.)

"GURPS is/was math heavy," is one of those memes that strikes me as more myth than fact.

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

So much for my pitch for GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 2: Mirror of the Printer's Devil.

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

I've encountered a slight math-heaviness when dealing with limitations/enhancements; multiplying non-round numbers by 1.7 or 0.4 is a smidge tricky for me. ("Okay; I want four levels of Less Sleep that only works when under extreme stress. Oh, and I want to be able to share the ability with allies, too." "Sounds awesome! Sigh. Let me get the calculator.")