Comments on: Legitimate vs illicit PDF: A side-by-side QC comparison

By: Tommy J

Tommy J — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 07:54:37 +0000

Here’s my take… it’s all in profits… they get 5 or 6 bucks a copy for a netbook they MIGHT sell a copy of. to do a netbook right would take a person the better part of a day just to scan and OCR… let alone the several days to repair layouts, correct mistakes, update with erratta, and finally index and bookmark in PDF. All told.. a truly professional job would take over a week per average sized book. I know… I’ve done it with books before so my players would stop spilling their sodas on my good hardcovers. Economically… you would have to sell hundreds of copies to pay for the man hours… even at a low hourly wage… to pay for someone to create even a handful of them. No… all they are going to do is create them as fast as humanly possible and then update the ones that users really complain about… maybey. Now what I’m planning to do is buy the PDF’s, then give them extreme make-overs. If the company is lucky I may even upload the enhanced edition back to them in exchange for a new book to copy… what can I say… unlike them I LOVE gaming and am willing to put hours into it for slave wages.

By: Brian Carnell

Brian Carnell — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 01:02:46 +0000

I had the same experience with comic books. On my blog I have done all I can to publicize the Marvel CD/DVD releases of Spider-Man, etc., and written quite a few e-mails to various journalists who have written about the dearth of legit digital comics from major comics publishers.

But the bottom line is that the scans I can download without paying a penny are much higher quality than the legit DVD releases.

Why don’t the companies just nab the scans and re-sell them? It’d be a lot easier than trying to download all of them from the fanboy’s perspective, there’s no upfront cost of having to do the scan themselves (which, as one of the other commenters notes, is very laborious), and surely there aren’t any IP issues given that the people scanning and uploading comics are almost certainly committing a crime in doing so.

By: Georg

Georg — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 11:02:12 +0000

That confirms my observations not only concerning ebooks, but also audio books and other digital editions delivered over an intangible medium. Even tough you pay, you get less (and often slower), as the companies do not care that much about a) the ease of use and b) the single title.

Concerning a: The “pirates” often seem to use their own product, ergo their product is user-centric, and moreover they have no money to loose => no motivation to restrictions. Thus, this advantage of priate’s versions is not likely to change, unless companies change their fundamental attitudes, e.g. towards “we employ only people consuming our products”.

Concerning b: The “pirates” seem to produce few titles only and thus are optimizing per title.What I do not understand: The companies are producing a big amout of titles, thus the price of good equipment spreads among enough titles, and they accumulate a lot of experience — thus they shall be producing the better quality…

Anyway, I wish you a nice role playing evening

By: bingle

bingle — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 19:31:05 +0000

Actually, there are a number of cases where the pirated versions of content are “better” than the legitimate versions. It really points at the lack of vision of content companies, and also at the care and love given to content by amateur hobbyists.

PC games are one realm where you’re often better off getting a pirated copy than a legitimate one – the legitimate copies are locked down with copy protection that sometimes interferes with other software, requires the game disc to be physically inserted, and other minor annoyances. The pirated versions are much easier to install and run.

Similarly, DVD movies often have unskippable advertisements, including copy protection warnings. The downloadable versions of these DVDs leave out the useless stuff and let the user play the movie right away.

It’s sad that the customer who downloads often has a better experience than the paying customer, but really the blame lies firmly with the content provider. It’s no wonder that customers choose to pirate so often. I imagine the people like Chris and I – who buy the legitimate version as well as downloading – are few and far between.

By: Kesh

Kesh — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 15:02:32 +0000

Actually, the classic PDFs were released about 3 years ago, or so. The project was begun then, and I donated a few old classics I had to the project. It’s just that in the last year, WotC has opened it up to a few more retailers (namely DriveThruRPG and Paizo). Originally, they were sold through a site of their own, then through RPGnow (which still offers them).

The trouble is, the project never got much funding and was essentially a one-man job. When he could no longer keep up, it died. He managed to get a bunch of classics scanned and put up, but there’s a few notable ones missing still.