The Pathfinder role-playing game was originally developed under the Open Gaming License as a “replacement” for D&D 3.5th edition after Hasbro announced it would no longer be supporting the game. Hasbro was changing over to its new, streamlined D&D 4th Edition rules, which suddenly left all the 3.5th-edition supplements its OGL had fomented without an available master rule set. However, the Open Game License meant that Paizo, Pathfinder’s developer, was free to take the core of the D&D rule set and create a new, compatible game around them. One noteworthy thing about Pathfinder was that the entire full-length version...

During GenCon, I had the opportunity for a brief interview with Phil Reed, Chief Operating Officer at Steve Jackson Games, in which we discussed e23, Steve Jackson Games’s PDF e-book store. We’ve mentioned the store a time or two in the past, as when “Reverend Pee Kitty” talked about how the program had expanded beyond its original intended goals. I took the chance to find out from Mr. Reed some more about how this program was working. Me: What gave you the idea to do e23? Phil: When I joined the company in '99 it was already in...

This is my coverage of Michael Stackpole’s presentation on how writers can take advantage of the e-publishing revolution. Stackpole does charge for this talk (it was $8 at GenCon; he will be giving it again at DragonCon in September), and gives it at a number of conventions. It was a very interesting panel, and more than worth the admission fee. If you’re in the area of DragonCon, or any other convention where Stackpole is speaking, I strongly encourage you to go. In deference to his need to earn a living, I will condense my detailed notes down to general...

Just as Paul has returned from his trip, I have returned from mine. And while traveling by motorcycle is cool, it pales in comparison to traveling by Tardis! Seriously, I’ve come back from GenCon with recordings of several reviews to transcribe and typed notes on a panel to put up. I hope to begin that process this evening. Thanks to the writers’ symposium programming track, there were a number of authors available, and I interviewed Michael Stackpole and Greg Stolze, both of whom have done self-e-publishing work that I have covered here. I also interviewed webcomic artist...

I am now at GenCon, the original gaming convention and now a huge event attended by dozens of gaming and media companies with an attendance in excess of 30,000 people. I’ve spent the last couple of hours mostly wandering around the dealer room, though I did get in a 30 minute interview with self-publishing writer Michael Stackpole that I will post when I have time to transcribe. It is still an impressive event. The game industry was one of the first sectors of publishing to embrace e-publishing fully. As Stackpole pointed out during our interview, game companies...

Futurebook has an article looking at a recent discussion in Soho held as part of a “Future of Publishing” conference series. As the piece points out, it seems like you can’t turn around without running into another conference or other event trying to determine how to deal with the “future of publishing”, but this series differs in that it tends to offer some hands-on exercises aimed at finding practical solutions. A few interesting things that came out of this discussion include the contention that, even though e-book readers and tablets have taken off in the last few years, the...

I was able to get a day off from my day job, and so I will be attending GenCon this year, August 7th through 10th in Indianapolis, in order to cover e-book-related matters for TeleRead. (If any of our readers or contributors will be in the area and would like to meet up, let me know.) And there certainly will be some such matters to cover. While GenCon started out as a strictly role-playing game convention, it has expanded to take into account other media, much like ComicCon. There are a number of events relating to non-game-related writing, and quite a...

On Monday July 4th, the World Public Library's annual World eBook Fair launches, which will combine works from Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and other public collections to create a massive 6.5 million title catalog. The collection will include not just ebooks but other media like music and movies, as well as sheet music and dance choreography. EBookNewser points out that there don't seem to be any events scheduled during the fair to increase visibility, which seems too bad. At any rate it runs until August 4th....

The Bookseller is reporting on reactions from BookExpo America to Amazon’s choice of former TimeWarner CEO turned agent Laurence Kirshbaum to head up its publishing division. Independent booksellers were fairly optimistic, some suspecting Amazon might even offer them better deals than chain bookstores due to potential pushback from chains who see Amazon as their chief competitor. Publishers were more worried, however, fearing that the Amazon move could reduce competition. Agent Richard Curtis, who also runs E-Reads, said: "However, because of Amazon's dominant retail position, their wealth and leverage could have a dampening effect on...

I’ve brought up a number of times the idea that publishers need to do more to connect with the general audience. On Publishing Perspectives, Amanda DeMarco writes that the same holds true in Germany—even at industry events that are open to the public. DeMarco writes about the Leipzig Book Fair, an open-to-the-public event that had 163,000 visitors this year. She feels publishers missed a great opportunity to inform interested members of the general public about some of the issues that are facing publishers today concerning the migration of books to e-books, online vs. brick-and-mortar sales, and other matters....

The Bookseller has some interesting coverage of the London Book Fair, but I don’t have time right now to go over all of it. I’ll focus on the one bit that just leaped out at me. A number of execs—David Shelley of Little, Brown, Richard Mollet of the Publishers Association, and Stephen Page from Faber—explained that fighting online piracy is costing publishers a bundle, and is one of the reasons publishers cannot afford to raise e-book royalty rates as some publishers have been requesting. In the FutureBook blog, Philip Jones notes that there was some skepticism from the audience, and also...

Publishing Perspectives has a brief piece about a London Book Fair seminar to be given tomorrow by Evan Schnittman, Bloomsbury’s MD, Sales and Marketing, Print and Digital. Schnittman’s position is that the publishing industry needs to move to a global publishing model rather than stay bound up in territorial restrictions. Interestingly, one of his supporting arguments does not involve e-books, but the inverse—companies that sell print books, like Amazon or the Book Depository, are cheerfully shipping print books around the world in response to Internet orders, meaning that local publishers can lose out on sales to publishers from other...