On Demand Hardcovers?

Anaraxes · 07-17-2023, 06:38 PM

From the gamers I know, books are mostly bought by the collectors, and they'll like hardbacks.

The main attraction for softcover is the lower price, which translates into an ability to have a larger library. But PDFs serve that goal even better, except for those that insist on having a physical copy.

Personally, I, like Refplace, have gone over to electronic books for game rules. The PDF search function is just too useful for reference -- especially if you're talking something as large as GURPS 4e. Even face-to-face, I have a laptop on which to tote the library and do the search to find all the references.

If I had a suggestion, it would be to bundle the hardcopy books with the PDF versions (as do many other RPG companies) at something like the hardcopy price. I don't think it's unreasonable to price the PDFs alone as SJG does; they still have to cover the production costs, just like a hardcopy, and the cost of the paper itself, though not trivial, isn't really that much of the final price of a book. Just because the marginal cost of copying and watermarking a single existing PDF is tiny doesn't mean that the cost of creating it to have one to copy is tiny, and RPG sales aren't huge volume, so all the writing, editing, layout, art, and other staff and production costs aren't spread thin over millions of copies. But to me, it does feel a bit unfair to have to pay that creation cost twice, once built into the paper price and again for the PDF. And since I need the PDF for actual play, that means the separate pricing strategy actually means I buy fewer physical books than I would if they were bundled. (For me, that tradeoff has actually worked the other way around, going back and buying PDFs of books I originally bought in hardcopy which I decided I used them often enough for reference that it'd be worth it.)

Doubling the price to have both makes it an either-or choice, where "both" isn't really an option. I have maybe ten(?) hardcopy GURPS 4e other than Basic -- I'm not even sure, since they just sit in the basement -- but over a hundred and fifty 4e books (not all of which exist in physical form). At the price points of the Girl Genius example, we're talking several thousand dollars to have the physical copies on top of the PDFs, as opposed to only around a thousand more to have them all both in hardcopy and PDF, had the pair been bundled at the hardcopy price. I don't know that the second would have happened had it been a choice, but the first option certainly won't.

07-17-2023, 06:38 PM	#5
Anaraxes Join Date: Sep 2007	Re: On Demand Hardcovers? From the gamers I know, books are mostly bought by the collectors, and they'll like hardbacks. The main attraction for softcover is the lower price, which translates into an ability to have a larger library. But PDFs serve that goal even better, except for those that insist on having a physical copy. Personally, I, like Refplace, have gone over to electronic books for game rules. The PDF search function is just too useful for reference -- especially if you're talking something as large as GURPS 4e. Even face-to-face, I have a laptop on which to tote the library and do the search to find all the references. If I had a suggestion, it would be to bundle the hardcopy books with the PDF versions (as do many other RPG companies) at something like the hardcopy price. I don't think it's unreasonable to price the PDFs alone as SJG does; they still have to cover the production costs, just like a hardcopy, and the cost of the paper itself, though not trivial, isn't really that much of the final price of a book. Just because the marginal cost of copying and watermarking a single existing PDF is tiny doesn't mean that the cost of creating it to have one to copy is tiny, and RPG sales aren't huge volume, so all the writing, editing, layout, art, and other staff and production costs aren't spread thin over millions of copies. But to me, it does feel a bit unfair to have to pay that creation cost twice, once built into the paper price and again for the PDF. And since I need the PDF for actual play, that means the separate pricing strategy actually means I buy fewer physical books than I would if they were bundled. (For me, that tradeoff has actually worked the other way around, going back and buying PDFs of books I originally bought in hardcopy which I decided I used them often enough for reference that it'd be worth it.) Doubling the price to have both makes it an either-or choice, where "both" isn't really an option. I have maybe ten(?) hardcopy GURPS 4e other than Basic -- I'm not even sure, since they just sit in the basement -- but over a hundred and fifty 4e books (not all of which exist in physical form). At the price points of the Girl Genius example, we're talking several thousand dollars to have the physical copies on top of the PDFs, as opposed to only around a thousand more to have them all both in hardcopy and PDF, had the pair been bundled at the hardcopy price. I don't know that the second would have happened had it been a choice, but the first option certainly won't.