How the Heck do you Publish anyways! Pt 2.3: eBooks

Posted on Feb 28, 2011 | 3 comments

There is a lot of debate over the fair cost of PDFs these days. It seems as if PDFs are almost worth nothing, selling at a disposable item cost of $2.00 a download and PDFs over $20.00 are baulked at. Like everything else right now, RPGs are struggling through the conversion from physical to digital content. How will it all turn out? Here is my two cents.

PDFs are cheap because they Suck

As many people are aware, a PDF is a document format created by Adobe to create a standard document format for Printers. The biggest trouble with it is, it does not and was not meant to replace print products. There are barely any advantages to reading a book in this format. I for one have never read a full book as a PDF. Most users use PDFs for reference purposes and as a way to store backups and reference books digitally, rather than leisurely reading.

The reason PDFs cannot replace books is because PDFs do not read well on screens. They are not setup to read on any specific devices and more importantly, PDFs are not Reflowable Documents. A reflowable documents is “a type of electronic document that can adapt its presentation to the output device. “ Reflowable documents automatically warp the text of the document to match the device. The user doesn’t have to zoom in or out, turn the screen horizontal, or lose their place on the page.

eReaders

eReaders have been around for a long time, but in the last few years they have really started to take off in their own right. There are many different eReaders, most with their own eStores. The Kindle and the iPad are very popular.

One interesting point about the Amazon Kindle is its popular following; some even prefer to read books on the Kindle to hardcover books. This may be partially due to Amazon artificially lowering the price of books for the Kindle to drive up its popularity. This makes it very expensive for publishers to sell in the Amazon store. These

There is a good chance that someday, Digital book formats will replace print books if they are done right to improve the reader’s experience and as eReaders become more common, PDF could start to disappear in favour of more eReader compatible formats. There are several challenges foreseeable for RPGs in this format:

• There are less options and control for layout making Images and tables awkward.
• Referencing while you are playing may be slower on devices as not all formats support interactive linking.
• eReaders cannot be both in colour and have an easy to read Matte screen.
• eBooks make little money for Publishers due to distributors control of the market.
• Due to international copy write issues, Digitial Books are often difficult to purchase internationally, even if you own one of these devices.

Imagine for a quick second all these issues were resolved. You could download and read a core RPG book on a digital eReader that looked great and was easy to use. So the million-dollar question for publishers is, would you pay around full price for a digital RPG book if the experience was better or equal to reading a print book?