Should GW sell PDF's of their Army Books and Codexes ?

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**warboss**

Balance wrote:
I was joking a bit. it seems to vary widely by area. I have heard some store owners that consider GW predatory (mostly from the UK) as they used indie stores to determine where to site theirs, but I know a former local store had good and bad periods as the local GW sales rep went from one who was cool and tried to work with the stores one vents to one that just wanted to sit back and let orders roll in..

Don't get me wrong, they are predatory. But if they apparently have no interest in running youe particular store OUT of business then they might extend a friendly hand. They did exactly what you mentioned to my old FLGS when they opened up a store 2 miles down the same road in the same suburb from the best selling/stocked store in the region at the time... and this was only GW's second store in the ENTIRE state so it's not like they had saturated the retail market and had no choice.

**Crom**

Skinnereal wrote:If they're worried about piracy, sell it anyway. If you can't beat them, join them.

iTunes and Kindle are doing well, despite the Pirate Bay and other sources.

Having a legitimate source of rules will only add to the amount of e-books out there. If they can get some money out of it, it's got to be worth their time to set up some deal with Amazon or someone.

Exactly! Lets look at good online business models that are super successful...

Amazon
ebay
iTunes
Steam
woot
newegg

Of course not all of these tie in to ebook sales. However, the business models of each of these can parallel that of ebooks in some sense or another. The fact is, GW would stand to make money off this and it could expand their sales into new gamers.

**Paul**

Ouze wrote:
Let me try and rephrase my point, which I don't think you're getting: if even one person did, it would be a net gain for Games Workshop. Presumably they are already sending PDF's to the printer

THIS is why these discutions go nowhere. People make arguments whilst knowing nothing about the subject. If you read back it is all explained, but it is not as simple as just publishing your printers files.

**Ouze**

Paul wrote:
Ouze wrote:
Let me try and rephrase my point, which I don't think you're getting: if even one person did, it would be a net gain for Games Workshop. Presumably they are already sending PDF's to the printer

THIS is why these discutions go nowhere. People make arguments whilst knowing nothing about the subject. If you read back it is all explained, but it is not as simple as just publishing your printers files.

Please show your work. I just re-read every single post in this thread and what you claim "is all explained" is never brought up by anyone, with the sole exception of Crom, who indicates that he did such publishing and it's trivial to output whatever format you like, including PDF.

So, what you said, except the exact opposite. Unless I missed something? Surely you can show me.

**Paul**

Paul wrote:
Kirasu wrote:If GW was smart they would release digital codices for half the price (due to not having to print and ship or stock them ).. They would sell A LOT more and not have to pay any overhead

I just want to point something out. I work for a major publishing house and noticed people sugesting that the books might be cheeper than the paper counterparts. I'm afraid that this is not true. There is a very good reason for this. The unchangable cost of a book make up about 80-90% of the cost of a book. Content, editorial, admin etc. The rest is stuff is bits that can be lost. A book costs anywhere from 50p to £2 + to print (for basic softback books) depending on print quality, paper quality, colours etc. For GW i would guess it would be at the upper end of this, given the fact that they are low volume, high quality product with full colour pages. Distribution is around 5% for a very efficent publisher going up to 10%. given the low volumes but small distribution network i would guess around the middle for GW.

This gives about 20% of the cost reduction for electronic books. They do, however, have some extra costs. Most of which im not sure of, as it is not my area of the business. There is compatability testing, re type setting, and the like, each needing doing for every divice. Then, in the uk at least, books are vat free. Ebooks on the other hand have 20% VAT on them.

I just thought people would be interested in the facts about the costs of ebooks.

Automatically Appended Next Post:
With all respect to crom, reading back on his posts, i tappears that he is not a professional publisher.

I admit that it is not explained in detail but it is not as simple as just outputting to pdf from whatever publishing software you use.

Automatically Appended Next Post:
To go in to more detail...

As soon as you change format, the same is true going fron hardback so softbach, a production editor needs to re-look at the formatting to check that if all fits correctly. Im sure that we have all seen magazines, even good quaty ones where the justification has screwd up a line. You then need to check thatt everything works as it should on every device. All of this is not cheep, and given the size of the market for gw, and the ipad and laptop owners within that, it is most probably not economicly viable.

Automatically Appended Next Post:
If it was as simple as people say don't you think the big publishing houses would have done it already? Or at least one of them?

Automatically Appended Next Post:
If you want more info let me know. I relaise now that my more info is not everything, but it is early and i have not sleeped very well.

**Ouze**

Well, it would appear my re-reading was not as thorough as I had thought; I stand corrected. You were right and I was wrong.

That being said, and going back to my original post on this - I think this would be a profitable market for them, even if it cost them some money to do the conversions.

**warboss**

Lets not forgot that if GW sells the PDFs, they'll likely do it through their own webpage on which they'll be able to keep close to 100% of the purchase price (everything but the credit card/paypal fee) as opposed to the majority of codices which are sold via independent retailers (garnering GW about 60% of the purchase price).

**snake**

Internet piracy is already rampant with hard copy books. I can't imagine what they would be with online PDFs.

Although it would be a cool idea would be to have the codices online so that they could be updated/corrected instantaneously, allowing GW to respond to faults and errors, etc, better.

**Medium of Death**

Kanluwen wrote:Why should they(or I, or anyone who buys the books) give a crap about the git who will only torrent the book having a crummy scan?

That's not my problem. Shell the money out for the book.

It appears that the thread was won, yet it's still continuing...

**warboss**

Medium of Death wrote:
Kanluwen wrote:Why should they(or I, or anyone who buys the books) give a crap about the git who will only torrent the book having a crummy scan?

That's not my problem. Shell the money out for the book.

It appears that the thread was won, yet it's still continuing...

Um, mainly because its not even close and his comment doesn't address the point of this thread. We're not talking about pirates (please see the title of the thread and its reference to SELLING the pdfs to customers). There is a demand as evidenced in this thread for professionally done and lawfully sold PDFs; GW is choosing to not produce a supply because they apparently have too much wealth and have spent all the money they can this year for "growth" per their financial statement. Pirated versions will be readily available and downloadable regardless of what GW does.