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I was just wondering if people would welcome publications from GW on Kindle-rules, army books etc etc....I reckon it'd be a winner

Im sure they would find a way for it to be stupidly expensive, but I would gladly get a legit e-book version of the rulebooks etc to have with me.

People would welcome every GW publication that is easy to pirate-copy without paying

Kroothawk wrote:People would welcome every GW publication that is easy to pirate-copy without paying

But that's the current situation.

GW is already 'competing' with scanned copies available online at a hard to beat price. ($0)

The current 'unofficial digital editions' have some legal and moral drawbacks. The way to marginalized these is to offer a better project at a reasonable price. It's the same tactic iTunes and other online music sellers have taken.

I would pay close to, if not retail, to have the books on my Kindle

Na, i would not be interested. Refrence books don't work for me in e format. To much of a pain to look things up.

No, it would be a bad idea at least in my opinion

Yes illegal downloadable pdf's are already out there and so why would you want to pay for the kindle edition, if you do not want to pay for the original.

Costs would be cheaper but you still have to pay for the reader itself (£90 or thereabouts) before you start. On a practical point flicking through a REader is far harder than flicking through a book.

One idea though would be for GW to publish PDF's (DRM protected if they wanted) of all the older material no longer in use, as they did for Dark Future and Epic A. Now a complete library like that may be worth a bit of my hard earned cash

I Approve of this Idea.
if we could get GW to do this it would suprise and please me. Here are both some pro's and con's to this Idea:

Pros:
1: Weight: It would be drasticly reduced, ans both the core rulebook and any and every codex would weigh less than a pound.
2: Carryability: As said above, and those books are rather bulky! Why not have something that is around 8" by 6" and less than a quarter inch thick?

Cons:
1: Price: As we know, GW would make it impractical to purchase said E-Books
2: Copyright: Isn't this one self explanatory?

Still, I feel like this would be a great Idea!

Con: eReaders are expensive and easy to have stolen.

wilycoyote wrote:No, it would be a bad idea at least in my opinion

Yes illegal downloadable pdf's are already out there and so why would you want to pay for the kindle edition, if you do not want to pay for the original.

Costs would be cheaper but you still have to pay for the reader itself (£90 or thereabouts) before you start. On a practical point flicking through a REader is far harder than flicking through a book.

One idea though would be for GW to publish PDF's (DRM protected if they wanted) of all the older material no longer in use, as they did for Dark Future and Epic A. Now a complete library like that may be worth a bit of my hard earned cash

kroothawk wrote:People would welcome every GW publication that is easy to pirate-copy without paying

kanluwen wrote:Con: eReaders are expensive and easy to have stolen.

Every GW publication is already available for illegal download.

Illegal downloads are also available for many other game systems that successfully sell PDFs like Pathfinder.

Many people who would not download an illegal PDF, for moral reasons or even to simply avoid a corrupted file would be happy to pay for a slick, well put together, GW produced PDF rulebook.

Flicking through some eReaders are harder than flicking through a book, but some have a really intuitive design, and some people will use netbooks/laptops. I already use a laptop rather than bring copies of the books and FAQs I want to use.

GW is moving backwards, where instead of moving into the current century and offering PDFs of their books, they are switching over to hardback books, which makes it more inconvenient to lug around all the books you might need.

Your bag of miniatures is also expensive and easy to have stolen. How do you deal with that on a regular basis?

wilycoyote wrote:
Yes illegal downloadable pdf's are already out there and so why would you want to pay for the kindle edition, if you do not want to pay for the original.

Let's say there's a group of 'interested people' who want access to a digital book.

A percentage will only use legal means. Sellers love this group.

A percentage won't pay, ever.

That's a percentage off each end, but a big group that is in the middle. It's not a homogenosu group, but there's a lot of gradation. Some will buy if there's a legal option, some will only do so if the legal option is much better than the illegal option. Determining 'better' is, of course, difficuly as well as different people prioritize different features.

Look at music... Music went from a heavy-illegal-download to a lot more legal stuff because the legal services made several customer-friendly moves. Most all have dropped DRM (see below), they sell by-song, at reasonable prices. They built quality online stores and offer customer service, so you can go, find a song, buy a song without needing to deal with possibly low-quality or even virus-infected file sharing. In short, they provided value to the customers, so many (not all) are willing to pay a premium for the music.

As another example, look at Valve's Steam gaming service. Again, lots of steps to make it customer friendly. It does use DRM but in a very relaxed way (no limits on downloads or installations for most Valve games, at least). It provides a number of 'community' features, and often runs sales. Again, there's a value to the service that makes it worthwhile over downloading an .iso file of a new game.

DRM is pretty much going to be an ongoing expense as it's going to be broken. Even some of the more secure attempts have been broken because a partner forgot to lock up their special keys properly or similar. After a certain point, it may be better to spend no or minimal time on DRM and spend the savings on making digital products more attractive to users.

Yup, I'm not a huge music person, but I can tell you for certain that's how Steam worked for me. I was a little leery of it at first, but now, I've not gotten a game from anywhere else since DoW2 came out.

As to GW making rulebooks available as eBooks, it'd increase the amount I'd purchase. I'd wind up with a physical and eBook copy for the armies I play as well as the main book. If I were thinking about a different army, I'd be much more likely to pick up their Codex in an eBook version. Pricing contingent of course.

It would only add potential sales, why not?

MrGiggles wrote:Yup, I'm not a huge music person, but I can tell you for certain that's how Steam worked for me. I was a little leery of it at first, but now, I've not gotten a game from anywhere else since DoW2 came out.

That's the interesting thing. A lot of people that can't stand DRM are OK with Steam, mainly because Valve has a really good reputation for providing value to customers.

MrGiggles wrote:
As to GW making rulebooks available as eBooks, it'd increase the amount I'd purchase. I'd wind up with a physical and eBook copy for the armies I play as well as the main book. If I were thinking about a different army, I'd be much more likely to pick up their Codex in an eBook version. Pricing contingent of course.

Definitely. I might even pick some up, and I don't play 40k any more.

Paul wrote:Na, i would not be interested. Refrence books don't work for me in e format. To much of a pain to look things up.

#

I agree entirely. I have put a few pdf image intesive books (they were electronics manuals) on my kindle and it is not good at all, even without trying to then look anything up on it.

SilverMK2 wrote:
I agree entirely. I have put a few pdf image intesive books (they were electronics manuals) on my kindle and it is not good at all, even without trying to then look anything up on it.

Despite my advocacy above, I do prefer reading printed books. However, I really like having PDFs for reference at times. I have the documentation for several systems I work on and it's great as they're searchable, etc.

My biggest issue with using them for wargames is that they source books are often organized with a lot of flipping around needed, which most PDFs aren't optimized before. For example, any time where a book has a squad description on one page, but you need to refer to other pages for model/weapon stats or similar.

In theory, I'd love it if they did this. Although, they'd have to add in one more caveat for it to even be worth my time.

People who bought the paper versions should be able to buy the digital versions at a heavy discount. For me, a digital version would merely be a handy supplement to my hard copy, and there is no way in hell I'm going to be swindled twice, just for that minor convenience.

So, while I support it in theory, I can totally see them making it completely unappealing to me. I'll try to remain optimistic, though.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Balance wrote:Despite my advocacy above, I do prefer reading printed books. However, I really like having PDFs for reference at times. I have the documentation for several systems I work on and it's great as they're searchable, etc.

My biggest issue with using them for wargames is that they source books are often organized with a lot of flipping around needed, which most PDFs aren't optimized before. For example, any time where a book has a squad description on one page, but you need to refer to other pages for model/weapon stats or similar.

I've already had a bit of experience with using GW PDFs for reference - the rulebooks for specialist games like Necromunda and Blood Bowl can be downloaded for free, not to mention all the Errata/FAQs. And, while being able to actually flip/hold pages with your fingers will always be superior to scrolling, using the text-search function to find specific rules or quotes you need is magnificent. If you can't remember where something is, the presence of a text-search function gives you a whole other dimension of utility that just doesn't exist on paper. I've lost count of the amount of times that ctrl-f'ing saved me what would have probably been several minutes of frantic manual page scanning.

Kanluwen wrote:Con: eReaders are expensive and easy to have stolen.

You're the reason we can't have nice things. :(

Darkness wrote:I would pay close to, if not retail, to have the books on my Kindle

Same here...

Mastiff wrote:

Kanluwen wrote:Con: eReaders are expensive and easy to have stolen.

You're the reason we can't have nice things. :(

Heh. I mean, look at how often we have reports of people walking off with army cases.
Army cases!

Look at your Kindle. Look at your Army Case. Now look back at your Kindle.

Oh snap, it's gone because it's pocketable by someone with little to no ethics!

Really though. It's a con that rarely gets mentioned, but should more often. You won't see people stealing codices. Imperial Armour books maybe, but even then it's impractical.

Cryonicleech wrote:It would only add potential sales, why not?

It possibly lose hard copy sales while making it more easy for those that have illegal copies to use them at tournaments/stores.

I must admit I'm not a huge fan of pdf documents anyway, I spend enough time at work on computers (on Dakka ) rotting my vision away without doing it at home as well. To prove it I'm the sort of dumb-ass that prints the 200+ page free rules sets they do publish (Specialist Games etc).

Friend has a really big phone/very small tablet. Some Android device I believe. If it was useful as a PDF reader, it would have the advantage of being something you could keep on a chain on your belt.

I agree with you Kan, when you say that a Kindle or tablet device is easy to walk away with, but honestly, most of the things we bring to the FLGS/tournament are as well. Books, models, foam and bag, my phone if I set it down, all come to mind. I just don't see potential theft as a reason to not do PDFs. We are all responsible for taking care of our things, and if we don't do a good job of it, things might walk away.

It would only give GW a chance to make more money, so why not I guess. If you could get E-book codexes than that would be really sweet, just as long as they dont screw with it and make em super expensive

Kanluwen wrote:

Mastiff wrote:

Kanluwen wrote:Con: eReaders are expensive and easy to have stolen.

You're the reason we can't have nice things. :(

Heh. I mean, look at how often we have reports of people walking off with army cases.
Army cases!

Look at your Kindle. Look at your Army Case. Now look back at your Kindle.

Oh snap, it's gone because it's pocketable by someone with little to no ethics!

Really though. It's a con that rarely gets mentioned, but should more often. You won't see people stealing codices. Imperial Armour books maybe, but even then it's impractical.

No, it really shouldn't because it's sort of a ludicrous argument. It's akin to the RIAA arguing that music shouldn't be available in MP3 because Ipods are expensive and small and easily stolen. It's a preposterous, inane argument that could be used to argue against any technology that runs on any sort of device that is smaller then a breadbox and costs more then $10.

The only thing more ridiculous then that argument is the fact I had to edit this post 3 times to fix spelling errors.

Ouze wrote:

No, it really shouldn't because it's sort of a ludicrous argument. It's akin to the RIAA arguing that music shouldn't be available in MP3 because Ipods are expensive and small and easily stolen. It's a preposterous, inane argument that could be used to argue against any technology that runs on any sort of device that is smaller then a breadbox and costs more then $10.

The only thing more ridiculous then that argument is the fact I had to edit this post 3 times to fix spelling errors.

So, basically you're assuming that my argument is that it will always happen, yes?

Because that's not my argument--and I can't imagine Games Workshop caring one friggin' bit about them being stolen with your PDFs/eBooks on there. It's a potential drawback.
It might or might not be something they take into account, and not because it's "akin to the RIAA arguing that music shouldn't be available in MP3 because iPods are expensive and small and easily stolen"(which it's really not, because the RIAA isn't potentially responsible via store insurance policies for stolen property or responsible to parents of minors who have their stuff stolen).

Frankly, the only reason I mention it is because it's not a good idea to bring technology to a place where you're going to be playing with people you do not know personally.

In an environment where you're playing with good friends at their homes--it's less likely to happen, and shouldn't be considered.

I dont think it's a good idea because GW will do PDFs in a half-assed way as usual.

If im going to spend money on a codex I prefer to BUY the book at my local store, then scan it for myself, create bookmarks and allow it to be EDITED to include future FAQ and errata..

I imagine a GW codex will have none of those useful features because they'll put tons of locks on it (which would then force me to bypass the locks thus wasting my time!)

Kanluwen wrote:

Mastiff wrote:

Kanluwen wrote:Con: eReaders are expensive and easy to have stolen.

You're the reason we can't have nice things. :(

Heh. I mean, look at how often we have reports of people walking off with army cases.
Army cases!

Look at your Kindle. Look at your Army Case. Now look back at your Kindle.

Oh snap, it's gone because it's pocketable by someone with little to no ethics!

Really though. It's a con that rarely gets mentioned, but should more often. You won't see people stealing codices. Imperial Armour books maybe, but even then it's impractical.

I get what you're saying, but I suspect the market for the online codexes would be people who have already bought a kndle or iPad, and tend to bring them everywhere anyways. Being at a tournament means being more aware of the risk, but I don't see that as a dealbreaker.

I was arguing with Kan about this for ages on steam - we eventually agreed to disagree

Arguing on Steam. Oh the irony.

Yeah "Your kindle might get stolen!" isn't an argument against electronic Codex releases. It's not really an argument against anything.