Not specifically e-book-related, but the news has just come out that Wizards of the Coast will be publishing a 5th edition of the Dungeons & Dragons RPG. Since taking ownership of  the property in 1997, Wizards of the Coast has produced two and a half new editions of the game, experimented with open-style licensing, and subsequently moved away from it. It inspired the creation of a cloned game system, Pathfinder, when fans got upset that the 3rd/3.5th edition mechanics were being totally thrown over in favor of more MMO-like play in 4th edition. Seeing a new edition come out...

How are digital media changing our buying habits? They are changing them, there’s no question, but we often don’t think about how. But something that’s happened over the last few days has led me to think about it. 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...

Even as Gabe Newell of Valve continues to lecture that piracy is brought on by companies offering poor service rather than an unwillingness to pay for games, some game companies seem to have a hard time learning the lesson. 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...

Our sister blog GamerTell points out a set of game-related e-book deals for the holiday season. Games Workshop e-book publisher Black Library (whom we’ve covered here before) is offering a number of e-book and audiobook bundles for fans who haven’t bought in yet. Some of them are a little pricey. For example: 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...

The Literary Platform has an essay by Richard Beard, Director of the National Academy of Writing, on how writers can help create a new narrative form. The form in question seems to be the appbook—Beard discusses how adding multimedia and clever organization methods for the digital form can turn printed books into something “new” on the tablet. (One example he brings up is myFry, the app edition of Stephen Fry’s latest autobiography (which I covered last year). 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...

I found a pair of unrelated stories concerning Russia and piracy today in my Google Reader trawl that make for an interesting juxtaposition. 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%...

Engadget has a couple of first looks at the new Kindle and Kindle Touch, including a video of the Touch in action (that doesn’t seem to be working at the time of this writing). As expected, the loss of the keyboard handicaps the basic Kindle slightly, as now any letter-based interactions have to be entered through an on-screen virtual keyboard. But on the other hand, for a “pure” e-reader, typing is only something you do occasionally anyway, so it may not be that much of a handicap in the long run. Certainly Kobo and Sony don’t seem to have found...

We’ve carried posts before that posited that e-books had not yet reached the watershed moment where they became more than an attempt to reproduce one medium in another (the way that television was originally “radio with pictures”, for instance). At the moment, they’re just “printed books on digital screens.” And while that’s fine for the people who just want another way to read printed books, video game developer Simon Meek thinks that they’re still not reaching out to modern audiences. Meek has the idea of doing for the gaming generation what PBS used to do for the television generation:...

What used to come exclusively on paper can now be ordered digitally, so you get it faster and cheaper. That’s one of the boons of e-books and on-line newspapers, but it also applies to other forms of digital content—such as one I had not quite expected, the digital on-line game time card. A superhero massively-multiplayer online game that I used to put a lot of time into, City of Heroes (which I previously mentioned here and here), recently announced it will soon be going “freemium”—allowing gamers to play for free, much like other MMOs I mentioned in my earlier...

In April, I covered the contention of Good Old Games and its developer arm, CD Projekt that DRM drives gamers to piracy. At the time, I mentioned that CD Projekt would be releasing its next game The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings completely DRM-free. Now Paul just pointed me to a story on Afterdawn noting that CD Projekt has announced that the version 1.1 update for The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings will strip all DRM and computer-count restrictions that came with the game originally. I’m a little confused by this given that I’d heard it was supposed to...

Did you think digital cheap was only giving print publishers conniptions? Think again. Reminiscent of publishers’ feelings about 99-cent self-published e-books, Industry Gamers has a brief piece based on a talk with Mike Capps, president of Epic Games (the company behind the widely-used Unreal Engine for first/third person shooters) in which Capps suggests that the increasing prevalence of cheap iPhone and iPad games is doing traditional video gaming in. "If there's anything that's killing us [in the traditional games business] it's dollar apps," he lamented. "How do you sell someone a $60 game that's really...

Michael Humphrey has an interesting blog post on Forbes where he posits the use of video games as a method of conveying current news and events. He points to the CEO of Activision comparing the Call of Duty franchise to Facebook, pointing out that media is evolving, and the latest CoD game has already racked up 600 million hours of play time in just six weeks. And he talks about a new book called Newsgames: Journalism at Play that looks at the idea of combining gaming and journalism. While Humphrey is a bit critical of the way the book...