Rex said:
Right so when they are making so much more money per PDF sold, why bother lowering the price?
A publisher releasing a PDF on their own website could charge a lot less for the PDFs than for hardcopies distrubuted and sold through an FLGS, and make the same direct profit per sale on both. I'm OK with them charging a little more than that base cost for the PDF given the added convenience of a download, and to make a bit more money directly... but I'm not OK with a PDF that costs about the same as the hardcopy book.
I'm pulling all the numbers out of my ass here, but this is just a general demonstration of how I understand it working... let's say that a publisher sells the books to distributors for 33% of the final cover price, and then the distributors sell the books to the gaming stores for 66% of the final cover price. Again, these percentages are entirely mythical, I don't know how much the distributors and retailers cuts really are, but this is just to show the principle of what I'm talking about.
Let's take a book whose final retail cost through the FLGS is $24. The publisher would sell that to distributors for $8 per copy. The distributors would sell that to retailers for $16 per copy. So per sale, the publisher gets only $8 out of the $24 final price - and out of that they have to pay the printers, artists, writers, layout people etc.
Now let's take out the distributor and retailer from the equation, and just have the publisher sell directly to the public as a PDF. Now they don't have to pay any printing or shipping costs (OK, there's server and software costs, but let's assume for now that those are minimal). Also, they can charge more for the book and all of that will go directly to them, not to distributors or retailers. So the publishers could now directly charge customers $16 - or even $24 - for the PDF, and ALL of that (barring server fees etc) would go into their coffers to pay the people who produced the book. Personally I'd rather they charged closer to the $16 price rather than the full $24, because I know for a fact that they're not paying for physical printers or for people to ship the books to or from their warehouses.
Yet again, these aren't accurate numbers, it's just to illustrate the general principle of what is going on (as far as I understand it). And obviously places like DTRPG act as distributors and do take a cut of the money (so if the publisher skips DTRPG and sells the PDFs
direct to the customer from their own websites, they can make even more money per sale).
Of course, the publishers
say that they want people to buy books from the FLGS and not from them directly, but personally, I think that's self-defeating and misuguided. I personally don't care about supporting a retailer, I care about supporting a publisher - if the retailer goes down then the publisher is still there and I can still get the products I want from them directly, but if the publisher dies from lack of support then I won't be able to get any more of the products I want at all, so obviously I'm going to want the publisher to get as much of my money as possible.
That's not to say I don't by RPG books at all, because I do - largely because I don't have a laptop to take to games that I could put the PDFs on, or because the book just isn't available electronically at all. But often when I can't be arsed to go down to the FLGS, or just want to grab a book quickly, or just want something to read, I'll go straight for the PDF option.
One of the other many reasons I despise PDF's. There is no comparable value, no finding it sitting in a box and going, "Damn I forgot I had this!" and all that book stuff.
I've had the same feeling going through folders on my computer and going "wtf is this PDF? I forgot I downloaded that!".
