Now a new site, StoryBundle.com, has sprung up that promises to do for e-books what the Humble Bundle does for games: select a few quality independent e-books and allow people to set their own price for the DRM-free bundle. It still seems to be in the planning stages—the site is taking the email addresses of interested parties but does not yet have any bundles on offer.

It will be interesting to see how well it does. One of the secrets behind the Humble Bundle’s success is that many of the titles it offered had already made reputations of their own, and gamers saw this as a chance to snag these popular titles cheaply. Will the Story Bundle offer titles with similar reputations? Are there any independent titles with similar reputations?

I also wonder whether the Story Bundle will do the same as the Humble Bundle and pick a charity or two with which to split the take—I suspect that’s another part of the appeal in that it allows people to feel good about donating to help a charity they support at the same time they support the creators of the works they buy.

At any rate, I’ve signed up for the bundle’s email list and will post again when they announce their first bundle. I wonder what it will include?

(Found via GalleyCat.)

The popular BioWare video game series Mass Effect has had a series of spinoff novels, depicting events that take place elsewhere in the game universe simultaneously with the games. The first three of those novels were written by one of the games’ writers, Drew Karpyshyn. I’ve read them, and they told some very interesting stories, part of which formed backstory that was brought up in the first game.

But for whatever reason, the most recent novel, Mass Effect: Deception was farmed out to William C. Dietz, a writer who seems to write a lot of video game tie-ins. And all indications are that he did a poor job—fans of the game have compiled a 13-page list of inaccuracies, some of them rather major—in addition to inaccurate depictions of various alien worlds and species, one character entirely loses her autism, and another changes sexual orientation.

Subsequently, Christ Priestly, community coordinator at BioWare, issued an apology to fans for errors in the books. “We are currently working on a number of changes that will appear in future editions of the novel,” he wrote in a post to BioWare’s Mass Effect forums.

Though how they will do that without totally rewriting the book from the beginning is a headscratcher. As Gamertell writer Jenni Lada points out:

I honestly have no idea how Del Ray and BioWare are going to make this right. It’s not that there are just a few factual errors. There are whole scenes that would have to be rewritten to make things right. Gillian’s character might have to be re-examined in every scene to adjust her behavior. Either that, or a more plausible explanation will have to be provided for why she’s suddenly a normal teenager. I do get the feeling that it will be the last Mass Effect book written by Dietz.

As Lada notes, whatever BioWare does, the errors won’t be fixed until the next printing of the book. Of course, for the e-book version, those errors could be corrected as soon as BioWare finishes correcting them, by re-issuing the e-book—they wouldn’t have to wait for the book to sell enough to merit another printing. (Indeed, with the negative publicity and rash of one-star reviews, it’s hard to imagine anyone being willing to buy it now.)  It could even replace the erroneous versions customers already have, as was done with Neal Stephenson’s Reamde. It’s not clear when or whether BioWare will do this, however.

It’s really puzzling how a book with this many errors made it past BioWare to begin with. Even if Dietz couldn’t be bothered to do his research, didn’t anybody in BioWare familiar with the game world background actually vet the thing? Or was it treated more like a movie novelization where the important thing is to get the book cover out there to advertise the impending new game? Regardless, with BioWare already having to push the release date of Mass Effect 3 back repeatedly, the company probably didn’t need this additional black eye.

The suggestions include things like built-in deterrents, waiting to release games until more bugs had been worked out, giving paying customers extra content, and engaging with the community. Some of these solutions are more popular than others, of course. When you provide extra perks to people who bought new, it can come off as taking them away from people who buy used.

And in the end, the article suggests, it may not matter just what non-DRM measures (or even DRM measures) you take to reduce piracy—plenty of people will still pirate anyway. Sadly, this is the truth—even publishers who bend over backward to make their games more attractive to pay for than pirate find people will still happily rip them off.

For example, the games in the first Humble Indie Bundle could be purchased DRM-free for as little as a single penny for all of them—but a developer still estimated that as many as 25% of the games downloaded from their site were snagged via reshared links with no payment at all—and that’s not counting possible peer-to-peer or cyberlocker retransmission.

(Though oddly the same thing doesn’t seem to be true for DRM-free e-books; Baen’s DRM-free offerings are much less pirated than offerings from other publishers. Perhaps e-book readers are more loyal and principled than video gamers?)

And when that happens, developers don’t really have much recourse. As CD Projekt found, suing (alleged) pirates is a great way for game studios to tick off their customers even worse than DRM does.

The article closes:

If there’s a final, definitive solution to online piracy that doesn’t in some way involve Digital Rights Management, it has yet to be found. We can only hope that when such a solution is implemented, it’s one that’s as just to a product’s paying end users as it is to the companies that designed it.

But unfortunately, as crackable as most DRM is, DRM isn’t much of a “final, definitive solution” either. Some level piracy may just be a fact of life.

Seeing a new edition come out every four years causes a bit of consternation among fantasy gamers, given that a lot of other games (including the prior version of Dungeons & Dragons) had seen entire decades go by without new editions. Some fans decry the constant new editions as shameless money grabs, especially given how much RPG books cost to begin with. I have heard some speculation that these constant new editions are driven by Hasbro’s ownership of Wizards of the Coast, that the company wants a more toy-line-like revenue stream and that means coming out with new versions more frequently to drive more sales.

Of all electronic forms of media, I think that computer games (and other software, true, but I’m focusing on games here) are one of the most closely related to e-books, though perhaps they’re a little closer to digital music. As with books and music, they used to come solely on physical media that we buy not for the physical medium itself (well, unless you’re one of those people who like to smell books), but for the information contained within them.

With books and music, we consume the information ourselves, but with games we let our computer consume it. In the end, as with e-music, the result is almost exactly the same whether we buy the physical edition or the digital: we see or hear the same thing either way. (With books, of course, we read them on a device rather than off paper, but apart from that the principle is the same.)

Baen Books I’ll Never Read

As I’ve bought e-books over the years, I noticed something interesting about my buying habits. A lot of the time I would buy a whole month’s worth of Baen Webscription e-books at a time. If there were two or three books in there I wanted, I’d figure it was worth paying for the whole thing just in case I wanted something else from it later on.

As a result, when I look at my current Baen e-library, I see dozens of titles I’ve never read, and may never read—either they’re later books in a series I never got the first of (in some cases I can’t get the first ones, because they came out when Baen was still a print publisher and never have been converted to electronic versions yet), or they just failed to interest me. Sometimes I do go back and look for something interesting to read, and occasionally find a neglected diamond in the rough amid my Baen library, but I have little doubt I will grow old and eventually die never having read every single e-book I’ve paid for.

(There are also a few e-books I bought on sale from eReader or Fictionwise that I never got around to reading, but not all that many.)

Damn You, Valve

What brought this to mind was an on-line friend’s repetition of the stock phrase, “Damn you, Valve,” over the last few days. I usually found myself in agreement with the sentiment.

Valve, whose digital game distribution system Steam has the power to win video game pirates back over from the dark side, has been running daily sales, knocking various game titles down to 75% or even 90% off. And there are some titles there that are simply so good that when they become cheap you feel like you can’t pass them up. Hence, my friend’s mostly-kidding invective against the company for making him feel like he has to spend money there several times over the last few days when critically-acclaimed titles went on one-day sale.

I know that feeling well, because looking at my own Steam library I see far more games that I’ve bought but not downloaded than those that I have. Out of several dozen games on my account, I’ve played maybe a dozen of them, and I’ve only put hours and hours of play into 5 or 6 of them. Not all of these are due to Steam sales, of course—I’ve kicked a few bucks in for most every Humble Bundle so far, and they all come with Steam download codes (and this is actually more directly like my experience with Baen, since I don’t really care about most of the titles in the bundle but just buy them for the ones I do want)—but a lot of them are.

Some of these are very popular recent or slightly older titles: The Back to the Future game series. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. All the episodes of the first Sam & Max game series. Grand Theft Auto 1, 2, 3, San Andreas, and Vice City. (When did I get those? I don’t even remember buying them!) The Monkey Island games. Civilization III and IV. Spore. (I did play that some, but drifted away after a while.) The X-Com series. Even You Don’t Know Jack. They’re all waiting there, in the cloud, for me to reach out and grab them. But I never have, and given how little free time I have anymore between my day job, TeleRead, and once-and-current addiction City of Heroes, I don’t know when I ever will.

The Digital Choice

Thinking back to my life before e-books and game downloads, I can’t conceive of buying books that I never read or games that I never played. Even the games I got on sale got given a thorough spin. I can only point to 3 or 4 games, out of the couple of dozen on my shelf, that I bought and never tried. And why would you buy something just to take up space?

But with e-books and digital games, it seems there’s more danger of “out of sight, out of mind”. It doesn’t feel like I’m buying an artifact—it’s like I’m buying a choice. Pay this amount, this trifling little sum, for the choice to be able to read The Stars At War, or play Back to the Future, at some future time when I might want to. I don’t know when I’ll want to—I might never want to. But there’s at least a chance I might want to, and if I pass up this sale price, it might cost a bundle if and when I do.

(And Valve knows this entirely too well for the continued well-being of my pocketbook. That’s why they do it. Damn you, Valve.)

The Implications

Now, obviously it would be premature to generalize from myself to the entire rest of the world. I could be a special case. (Though I doubt Valve or Baen would be doing so well if I were.) But if I feel that way, I imagine at least some other people will, too. Come to think of it, Amazon says that people are buying twice as many e-books as they used to buy paper books after buying the Kindle, but are they actually finding twice as much time to read what they buy? This could result in more e-books getting bought than are actually read, more games being bought than are actually played, and perhaps more revenue going to creators than they would otherwise see.

Of course, there could also be people who buy even less now that it’s digital. (I know my parents don’t have any interest in paying new-book price for even paper books, let alone ones they can’t resell used or donate to a library if they want to.) It could all balance out.

Would creators rather people buy but don’t read their books (or buy but don’t play their games) than people read (or play) without buying (via library, rental, or piracy)? The money is necessary to live, of course, but most people who write will tell you that the egoboo of being read is at least part of the equation. I suppose whether authors will laugh all the way to the bank or cry that they’re being bought but not read depends on how big a part that egoboo is. (Though also, people are only able to pass along recommendations to books they have actually read.)

I suppose I’m going to continue buying Baen e-books and cheap video games that I might never read or play. I imagine a lot of people are. I wonder whether this is going to change the way books and games are published in a larger sense? Or perhaps the changes are simply part and parcel of the way electronic media are changing the publishing world as a whole.

However, one enterprising gamer noticed that the game stores the text for all the books in plain text, and has thoughtfully taken eight hours to go through and format them into Mobi and EPUB files for gamers to download to their e-book readers. Of course, this technically violates copyright—would-be readers should own the game itself in order to have the legal right to read this material—so it wouldn’t be surprising if it gets taken down before long. But even if that happens, knowing the books are stored as text should enable fans with a little know-how to roll their own.

Zachary Knight at Techdirt reports that last week, Ubisoft Shanghai creative director Stanislas Mettra seemed to imply that a PC version of the game I Am Alive would not be coming out because there were too many pirates and not enough customers on the PC platform. “If only 50,000 people buy the game then it’s not worth it,” he said.

After a flood of bad publicity, Mettra hastily backtracked, or “clarified”, saying that there had probably been a miscommunication because he was not a native English speaker—what he had meant to say was that piracy concerns were why the PC version of the game hadn’t come out yet, and whether there would be a port or not was not his decision.

To be fair, I don’t have the full text of what he said, just the snippets of the interview that IncGamers quoted in its article. He doesn’t explicitly say anywhere that the game wouldn’t be coming out, he just says he doubts the gamers who are complaining would buy it if it were available, and that piracy makes porting “hard”. So it could have been the simple miscommunication he says it was.

But there is a history of controversy surrounding Ubisoft’s use of DRM making its games harder for people to play (we covered it here, here, and here), and it seems the company is quick to blame piracy for any problem in the gaming industry. As Knight puts it:

Really Ubisoft, this is getting old. I feel like a parent scolding his child for the 20th time about hitting his sister. You think the child gets it after the first time and that the second time is an honest mistake. But, when the child continues to hit his sister, you need to take drastic disciplinary action. What will it take to get the message through to those in charge at Ubisoft? Gamers want your games and will buy them, but you have to provide the service they want. That is the only way you will succeed.

Of course, as e-book fans know, we have our own problems with publishers in that regard, and it’s simple to substitute “publishers”, “readers”, and “e-books” for “Ubisoft”, “gamers”, and “games” in the paragraph above and let it be just as true.

Christmas Space Marine eBundle: Space Marines are always fun. This collection takes the best novels and novellas highlighting specific famous Space Marine battle. In total, you get seven novels and four novellas for $75.89.

Though when you look at the individual books in the bundle, it doesn’t appear that you’re saving anything by paying the bundle price. The two novels I checked were $7.99 each and the novella I checked was $4.99, which means you’d be paying the exact same amount if you bought the bundle rather than individual titles if the pricing is consistent across all titles.

Still, the individual prices are relatively decent for e-books (if a little higher than I’d want to pay), so it may not be such a bad deal in the end, for those who find the books appealing.

Online environments don’t signal the death of reading – far from it. They can actively promote books to children, and pique their interest in new characters and stories. But just as a child will clamour to see a film adaptation of a favourite book, so they will seek out the virtual environment that brings that book to life. An online world that presents new challenges, new content and new games for a child is like giving them a new variation of that film every day, and letting them star in it.

Richards’s tips center around making the games more fun and rewarding and social for kids, but I can’t help thinking that in a way the idea of basing a world of games around the stories kind of misses the point of “letting [children] star in” their favorite story world.

There are other kinds of online worlds that fans of stories have been able to “star in” for something like twenty years now—text-based multi-user worlds such as PernMUSH (based on Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series) or AmberMUSH (based on Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber). Given the freeform nature of MUSH interaction, it has the potential to be a lot more satisfying to people who want to interact with real people, not computer-generated NPCs, and to feel as if their actions really do affect the world they’re playing in. (Yes, I know, they’re entirely text-based. Guess what? So were the books!)

And from text-based on-line adventure realms, it’s just a small step up to writing and fanfiction collectives. I’ve talked about the ones I participated in back in the day in my “Paleo E-Books” series. Shared settings, both fanfic-based and original (such as the “Paradise” transformation story series), continue to this day, made even easier by the advent of such tools as wikis and EtherPad. It’s got the same feeling of interaction as MUSHes, but on a grander scale because you can cause more things to happen at a time in your “turns”.

Of course, not everybody is necessarily going to have enough of the creative impulse to want to take part in such freeform worlds, so perhaps appealing to the lowest common denominator is the way to go for publishers who want to sell as many of their books as possible. But it would be nice if there were officially-sanctioned places (as PernMUSH was sanctioned by McCaffrey) for the people who wanted to. Nurturing the creative impulse now leads to more availability of books later.

Beard thinks such apps are a good starting point, though he is careful to differentiate this from run-of-the-mill “enhanced” e-books that are plain e-books with a few paltry DVD-like “extras”.

Which takes us to the most interesting version of what new digital platforms can achieve for reading and for writers. In time, apps may enable the creation of entirely new work that explores the narrative boundaries of the technology. This is likely to involve a combustion of soundtrack, images (still and moving) with text.

Why is it that ideas for creating new narrative forms around print media inevitably involve adding sound and video to it? It’s like print is some kind of backward child who needs remedial education, or a bicyclist who should instead be driving a race car.

Surely there are ample possibilities for new digital narrative forms that just involve print. Collaborative storytelling, for example, as posited by projects such as Runes of Gallidon, Elizabeth Bear’s Shadow Unit, or Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear’s Mongoliad. Even the MIT Media Lab is looking into collaboration and interactivity as a means of storytelling. The social rewards that come from participation and collaboration can be a very powerful incentive indeed for their participants.

So far, most experiments in commercializing en masse collaborative storytelling (as opposed to the projects I mentioned above that mostly tend to rely on a handful of “professional” writers interacting with their fans) seem to have largely gone under the radar. Projects like Ficly, Neovella, and Figment seem to have their own self-contained userbases, but none of them has exactly set the world on fire yet.

On the other hand, another sort of (somewhat) collaborative settings has set the world on fire: MMOs are attracting hundreds of thousands or even millions of players who do nothing more than traipse around inside virtual worlds, experiencing game designers’ stories from the inside. (Though the stories do tend to get a bit repetitive, given that characters tend to end up doing them over and over and over again…) Perhaps the current generation needs more stimulation than simple text can provide—and perhaps most are content to be story consumers rather than creators.

At least one MMO, City of Heroes, has given its players tools they can use to create their own stories for other players to play through. Some have speculated that this sort of toolkit could be used to create a new method of conveying journalism in the future.

Unfortunately it turns out that, rather than experiencing a renaissance of storytelling and story playing, most CoH players have been content to create story-free missions full of lucrative minions to fight in order to powerlevel themselves or earn in-game money. I suppose the tragedy of the commons will always be with us.

Maybe someday there will be some sort of MMO that perfectly satisfies the creative impulse. Or perhaps someone will come up with a way to make creativity in text more attractive to a larger audience. Either way, I think we should be trying to break out of the cognitive rut of thinking that the only, or even the best, way to create a new narrative form is just to mash up the book with a movie.

On Publishing Perspectives, Daniel Kalder interviews Sergey Anuriev, the CEO of Russian e-publisher Litres.ru. At the time the company was founded in 2007, there was no legitimate e-book business in Russia—it was “a 100% pirate market.” But at the time it launched, new legislation had founded new civil courts in Russia, which made it easier to fight piracy.

At the moment, the Russian e-book market is still very small, and Anuriev estimates that still 90% of the e-books consumed in Russia are pirate editions. But Litres is working to change that, signing arrangements with major Russian publishing houses to make their works available electronically. As a result, Litres has 60 to 70% of the legal e-book market in Russia.

Even though the Russian e-book market is still 1% or less of the overall book market, e-readers are still very widespread in Russia—and they may have an advantage over Russian print bookstores.

SA: We get business from all over Russia . . . You see, there is a very undeveloped “paper book” network in Russia. There are only 3,000-4,000 bookstores in the country, and most of those are in Moscow and Saint Petersburg and European Russia. In Siberia and the Far East there are very few bookshops. Meanwhile those bookshops do not have a good selection and so people have to read e-books. Everywhere in Russia people know about e-readers, why they should buy them, how to use them. They know that with the poor choice available outside Moscow, it is often the only way to get a book. Currently many people choose pirate resources, but in two years I expect the business will be about 70% legal.

At the moment, Litres is trying to fight piracy by low pricing. Currently it prices e-books at $3, 1/3 the cost of a paper book. It is hoping to increase its prices gradually until eventually it charges 75 to 100% of the print book cost. “The issue is very closely connected with piracy—remove the pirates and we will increase our prices,” Anuriev says. (Though from the perspective of a consumer, I would expect Russians who like to buy e-books would hope that piracy never goes away.) Publishing Perspectives has a separate discussion on whether low price is an effective way of fighting piracy.

The other story has to do with video game distributor Valve, and Valve founder Gabe Newell’s participation on a panel at a technology conference. During the panel, Newell talked about how Valve expanded its Steam electronic game distribution network into Russia. Newel reiterated what he has said before: Fighting piracy is not a matter of price or anti-piracy technology, but rather of giving consumers a better service than pirates do.

Newell: […] For example, Russia. You say, oh, we’re going to enter Russia, people say, you’re doomed, they’ll pirate everything in Russia. Russia now outside of Germany is our largest continental European market.

Ed Fries: That’s incredible. That’s in dollars?

Newell: That’s in dollars, yes. Whenever I talk about how much money we make it’s always dollar-denominated. All of our products are sold in local currency. But the point was, the people who are telling you that Russians pirate everything are the people who wait six months to localize their product into Russia. … So that, as far as we’re concerned, is asked and answered. It doesn’t take much in terms of providing a better service to make pirates a non-issue.

In other words, by providing the Russian product right away, rather than letting Russians have to wait for it while other parts of the world got it, he cut piracy by giving them the opportunity to buy right away instead of having to pirate it.

(Newell then gets into some surprising results of pricing experimentation (though this part isn’t strictly related to Russia), through which Valve determined that running huge sales on its products increases gross revenue at the time of the sale—but it also increases revenue after the sale is over. The sale wasn’t just “moving revenue forward from the future” in which people who would have bought it later cheaper bought it now cheaper instead, and it wasn’t cannibalizing its full-price sales. “Essentially, your audience, the people who bought the game, were more effective than traditional promotional tools.”)

This comes at a time when Russia is seeking entry into the World Trade Organization, amid accusations of not doing enough to enforce intellectual property rights. A Moscow couple was recently charged with distributing more than 30 pirated movies over the Internet, in Russia’s first major Internet movie piracy case. (Found via Techdirt.)

But even if Russia does crack down on piracy, it may be savvy marketeers such as Valve and Litres who bring about the most change, simply by providing legitimate services and making them more attractive to consumers.

As for the Kindle Touch, Engadget calls the touch screen “fairly responsive” with a good refresh rate, and notes that the on-screen touch-sensitive keyboard works well: “[A]ctivities like [performing a search] and typing are performed quite quickly for an E-Ink device.”

Update: Ars Technica has a first-looks post, too.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Hill at our sister blog Gamertell looks at the Fire in light of the gaming activities Amazon has been promoting lately. Hill points out that games are the most lucrative app category on the Amazon app store. He notes that Jeff Bezos played Fruit Ninja on the Fire as part of the demonstration, and that this and Amazon’s other appstore games are the kind of low-overhead, high-addiction games that have been so popular with iOS devices as well, and closes with the question:

So when it comes to gaming on a tablet, which would you prefer between a $400+ tablet with questionable future support and a $199 tablet powered by the internet’s largest online retailer?

I think that’s the first time I’ve seen Apple, the undisputed king of the tablet hill, cast as any kind of a tablet underdog. I have to applaud the sheer chutzpah of this approach, if nothing else.

But I doubt that gaming is going to be any kind of a primary driver of either iPad or Fire sales. You don’t get hooked on Plants vs. Zombies or Cut the Rope and then go look for a mobile device just to play it. That sort of gaming is what you find the device can do too after you originally bought it for other purposes.

And when you compare the iPad to the Fire directly, there really isn’t a comparison there: the iPad is still more powerful and capable of doing more things, which is why people want it. No, I think the iPad’s catbird seat in the tablet market is safe for a while yet. It may be even after the 10” Fire comes out. It’s going to take more than low-overhead gaming performance to knock Apple off the top.

Digital delivery of games can allow game publishers to do some interesting things. For instance, buying any Valve game box in the store includes a free Steam-based on-line version of it that players can download forever even if they lose the retail disks, Also, Valve throws in the Mac version of any PC game (and vice versa) that players buy, free—even if the Mac port doesn’t come out until months or years after the PC version. (And the PS3 version of Portal 2 includes a code good for both the PC and Mac versions.) It doesn’t really cost them anything to do this, since 0s and 1s don’t have any cost to copy. This form of bundling (as well as some other bundle promotions Valve has put together) makes the games more attractive to consumers, which leads to more sales.

Square Enix did something similar with its new game Deus Ex: Human Revolution, including a coupon good for a free $50-value downloadable version of the game inside the retail boxes sold in stores. The downloadable game was provisioned through the on-line distribution system OnLive, a competitor to both Steam and the system GameStop is developing.

This apparently annoyed GameStop’s corporate management, because last week an email came down directing all GameStop employees to open every new copy of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, remove and discard the coupon, and then put the box back on the shelf and sell it as new as if they hadn’t done anything to it. That’s right: GameStop was essentially selling vandalized games as brand new, at full retail price.

Unsurprisingly, this caused an Internet furor, and GameStop quickly responded by pulling all copies of the game from their stores. A week later, the company has apologized and announced it will be providing a $50 gift card and buy-two-get-one-free used game coupon to anyone who bought the game from one of its stores.

(Oddly enough, Square Enix itself didn’t seem to take that much offense, saying in a statement to PC World that “GameStop was not made aware of this inclusion and Square Enix respects the right of GameStop to have final say over the contents of products it sells and to adjust them where they see fit in accordance with their policies.” Presumably it just doesn’t want to risk GameStop dropping its games altogether.)

Deux Ex’s bundled deal is not the only digital gaming offer to spark controversy among retailers—last year, I covered UK game retailers’ annoyance with Valve for pushing its own online game retail system through the boxed games that are sold through their stores—but it is certainly the only example I’ve heard so far of a game store actually practicing vandalism against such a game.

At the moment, we’re not likely to see any similar conundrum popping up in the e-book world since most publishers see print books and e-books as entirely separate and distinct products, and think “bundling” would mean they lose out on the purchase of a second copy of the book rather than making the first copy more likely to sell. (This same mindset seems to be responsible for their belief that piracy represents lost sales rather than gained readers.) It’s left up to consumers who feel they should have gotten bundled e-books to do it themselves.

Only one publisher, Baen, does any sort of e-book bundling at all, binding CDROMs full of books into the back of selected first-printing hardcovers. And to my knowledge, I’ve never heard of any bookstore removing the CDROM before selling the book due to fearing e-book competition. I have heard of bookstores refusing to carry or promote print books published by Amazon, this does not result in those books being vandalized before they are sold the way GameStop’s decision did for the game.

By the same token, GameStop should simply have stopped selling Deus Ex and shipped its inventory back to Square Enix when it discovered the competitor’s coupon bundled inside. By opening the box, removing the coupon, and then closing it and reselling it as if nothing had happened, the company was trying to have its cake and eat it, too. Given how game retailers universally refuse to take back and refund any game that has had the shrinkwrap cut off, even if it hasn’t been installed on a PC yet, there’s an element of hypocrisy here, too.

Perhaps the crowning irony is that digital content distribution is set to put GameStop’s primary revenue model, of buying used games at ridiculously low prices and then reselling them at ridiculously high prices, out of business. As with e-books, you can’t resell a used digitally-downloaded game. (And for the most part, game publishers couldn’t be happier about that.)

The latest game changer, according to the children’s publishing industry, is J.K. Rowling’s site Pottermore. By combining e-book sales with a virtual world, it offers an entirely new way to market e-books, and one that looks as though it could be wildly successful.

An article on The Bookseller seems to think there’s something particularly special and attractive about virtual worlds.

Lisa Edwards, publishing director at Scholastic, which has its own virtual world with Horrible Histories, said: “Once young people have seen a brand, they want to experience it from different angles and to engage with other people experiencing it at the same time. Publishers are starting to look at that.”

The article doesn’t really elaborate on what it means by that, but I imagine it’s talking about the virtual shared environments that those of us at college in the ‘90s first knew as text-based MUDs, MUCKs, and MUSHes, and that live on today in graphical MMOs. While there have been plenty of MU*s based on literary works (the ones based on Amber and Pern come immediately to mind), it seems that Pottermore is going to be the first attempt at actually synergizing the two.

And it could work amazingly well. Historically, people have read books and played on-line games for the same kinds of reasons: to “escape into another world,” albeit in different ways. If Pottermore incorporates the same sort of virtual worlds as those, it could bring those two kinds of “escapes” together as never seen before.

I wonder if there’s a way for some of the existing virtual worlds to piggyback on this idea and add a little more literariness to themselves. For example, there have been tie-in novels and comic books written based on the MMO City of Heroes (that apparently didn’t do well enough to merit continuing). And the City of Heroes mission architect system (in which people can create their own in-game missions) has led to new ways of storytelling (including missions written by such notables as Mercedes Lackey). Is there some way they could take it further, and offer e-books that somehow tied into their story in a way that would increase interest in both the game and the books? Probably not, but it’s an interesting idea.

Another intriguing bit from that article:

Digital consultant KZero said there are now about 500 virtual worlds but that figure is predicted to grow to nearly 900 in 2012, with revenues more than doubling to $9bn by 2013, up from $4bn this year. The bulk of accounts—some 561 million—belong to 10 to 15-year-olds, fuelling demand for social networking within virtual worlds.

I’d really love to know what criteria that consultant uses to define a “virtual world”. I would imagine that, if you count all the MU*s that are still out there, you might get an order of magnitude more than 500.

One noteworthy thing about Pathfinder was that the entire full-length version of the game was offered for free download during its beta-testing period. So when I had the opportunity to speak to Jason Bulman, lead designer for Pathfinder, that was one of the main things I had to ask him about.

Me: Pathfinder originally came about, didn’t it, when Hasbro announced they were sunsetting the 3.5th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons which meant that everybody who had developed adventures for it was going to be out in the cold?

Jason: Well, we saw an opportunity to take what was a very popular ruleset and continue it on. The Open Game License allowed us to use those rules, and we decided that while we wanted to keep the system alive, we wanted to make some upgrades, some fixes, some changes. So we went through the ruleset and we identified the things that we always thought were kind of clunky or didn’t work very well, gave those a tuneup, and then we also decided to add more diversity, more option, more choice to the base classes, so we went through and made a lot of adjustments and changes there too. A lot of this was all designed to make for a better play experience.

Me: And when you were betaing it, I seem to recall that anybody could just download the complete beta version for free. Were you concerned that would have any effect on your sales?

Jason: We were hoping that it would generate interest, right? I mean, allowing everybody to get a chance to take a look at our rules before they hit store shelves and give us their feedback and suggestions really led to them being invested in our game. They were a part of making it. So it really gave us a lot of buzz, it really helped us develop a better game, and in the end it was totally worth it. So we don’t really feel that PDF sales necessarily compete with book sales. I think I personally feel very strongly that the sale of electronic books is a companion. Especially in our industry where people need good reference material. Referencing something at the table is one thing, but sitting down to read? Maybe you want a big physical book for that. A lot of people do.

Me: I notice a lot of gaming places here give the PDF version away free with purchase of a printed book.

Jason: We have a subscription process where if you subscribe to our books we will ship them to you and give you the PDF for free.

Me: And you sell this through the on-line RPG services like RPGNow and DriveThruRPG?

Jason: Actually our PDFs I believe are sold exclusively through our website at Paizo.com.

Me: So, going forward as Dungeons & Dragons continues to evolve into new editions, is Pathfinder going to stay pretty much the same, or are you going to come up with new versions of that eventually?

Jason: Well, you know, our game is only two years old at this point, so we’re not rushing to make a new edition of Pathfinder right at the moment. But the game continues to evolve, and even now two years later there are things that I wish I could have changed or fixed but I didn’t. Some of those things we really can’t fix, they’re endemic, built into the system, so we can’t really change those, but as we go along we make a lot of additions and changes to the game as we move along. It’s a living thing. But, yeah. I mean we’re on a different path now. So we’re doing our own thing, and if the time comes for a new edition, then we’ll certainly look at that. But I don’t think we’re there yet.

Me: The Open Gaming License allowed you to basically take the D&D rules and create a whole new game around them, or rather create a upgraded version of the original.

Jason: Yes.

Me: I noticed that Hasbro basically moved away from the Open Game License.

Jason: Well, they do have a game system license, but it’s kind of different. It works a little differently. It’s not quite as open as the Open Game License.

Me: I seem to recall the Open Game License was originally developed as a marketing move on Hasbro’s part.

Jason: Well, it was an attempt to get the entire industry producing books for D&D. And it worked wonderfully. Everybody started making compatible products.

Me: I seem to recall Hasbro wasn’t terribly pleased with Pathfinder.

Jason: I don’t really know about that. I can’t speak to that directly. I’ve been with Paizo now for six years and I’ve never worked for them. So I can’t speak to that directly. For us, we’re big supporters of the Open Gaming License. We really like that for our publishers, we value them, they put out great products, and the more people playing our games and making our games, the better, in my book. So we’re all for it.

Me: Well, I really appreciate the chance to talk with you. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we finish up?

Jason: No, I’d just like to thank you for the opportunity to let me talk. We had a great show, I hope you had a great GenCon too, and thanks a lot.