Via a news item on Gaming Report, I just saw that KenzerCo is offering many of their out-of-print titles as print on demand (POD) books on Lulu.
Several larger RPG publishers already sell their OOP products in PDF form (White Wolf and Wizards of the Coast, for example, each have hundreds of PDFs available on DriveThruRPG), but this is the first time I’ve seen OOP books offered in print form.
This strikes me as a very good thing for GMs — especially if you don’t like PDFs, or prefer physical books for longer products. I hope this is the start of a trend, and that every other RPG publisher will follow suit.
What do you think? Would you like to have this option for every OOP product?
Would you like to have this option for every OOP product?
Hell yeah! There’s lots of great stuff OOP stuff out there. Why make consumers track this stuff down on the secondary market when the publishers can make a little extra money putting out PDFs? That sounds like a win-win situation to me.
Maybe not every OOP product (there was some absolute crap published as well), but I think it would be great to get (for instance) a set of Basic D&D books printed for a kids’ gaming club.
Definitely a good idea, and if I were associated with a POD shop, I’d be tracking down old RPG copyrights.
Having OOP stuff available either as PDFs or POD books is a great idea. I prefer PDFs, but I’ll take what I can get.
“Would you like” and “Is it possible” are two entirely different beasts.
The problem with making OOP products available again is multi-fold:
1) “Back in the day,” before desktop layout programs and digital printing, products were laid out in physical form (a master), turned into plates, and then used to create books. Creating a PDF version of an OOP product isn’t as easy as loading it up and hitting “Export to PDF.” Several companies, even by 2000, were still using some fairly archaic methods of workflow.
“No problem,” you say, just scan it in. The problem is that takes time and resources to do, and if you follow the industry in the slightest those are the two items that every publisher lacks. Even Wizard’s converted their OOP products entirely on a part-time basis with one person. It’s not a business priority as these reprints will never amount to any meaningful bit of revenue.
2) Legalities are another big issue. In the 80s and for a good chunk of the 90s, royalty-based payment was quite popular. (Pretty much before the Internet arrived and there was a sudden swell of cheap, disposable writers, making Work For Hire contracts all the rage.) The problem with reprinting OOP products is that publishers have to track royalties, hunt down writers from 10+ years ago, and track sales/payments. Again, this is a massive headache for a product that would sell, what, 100-500 copies?
3) Licensed properties. The issues with this should be self-explanatory.
4) Nostalgia is overrated. Assuming the first two could be overcome easily, the reality is that there isn’t a meaningful market for these products because many of them, by today’s standards, aren’t that good. Game design, production, and format have all changed for the better. For a company, it isn’t a viable business model; the rewards versus the risk/cost just isn’t there.
It’s a lot like making/selling adventures. Everyone says they’re necessary, no one wants to make them, and when someone does no one buys them. 🙂
Would I love to own the entire James Bond RPG line by Victory Games again? You bet! Problem is that I don’t want cheap Lulu knockoffs of the material, I want the originals with their full-color handouts, dossiers, and cardboard screens. Sadly, that will never happen.
I love that idea, especially coming from a publisher mindset. My friend and I were talking about what good and bad d20 OGL has done for the gaming industry, and if it will survive under the glut of similar products, or transform into something different because of it.
Seeing old stuff available in paper form makes me happy, because it will offer some choice and a different perspective on gaming to players who have never bothered to step outside the bonds of d20. If I hadn’t started before the days of d20, I don’t think I would have much motivation to move away from it.
I hope more gaming companies follow suit, and release their old stuff in this form. The overhead to get this stuff into a PDF, and then leave it on a website is minimal, and the fan base gets access to it. There might, however, be some impact to FLGS that sell old products.
Unless a publisher goes out of business, I don’t really forsee anything ever really going OOP ever again. After all, now days everything is in electronic format before it’s produced, thus knocking out a PDF and sending it to a PDF shop isn’t a huge deal, especially when the PDF creation software is liscense, and not useage based and the PDF seller will host your files and works on comission.
the problem is with older works some of which may never have been in electronic format to begin with, or may be in electronic format that is no longer usable by todays hardware and software. Wizards, you may recall, when they started their “old products free as PDFs” line, had to pay someone to produce PDFs from an old physical medium, sometimes hundreds of pages worth. Depending on how that medium is stored, it might require equipment that no longer exists, materials that are now illegal, hours of labor…
So I’m not holding my breath to pick up PDFs of Torg, Rise of the Phoenix, or Empire of the Petal Throne, anytime soon, but anything produced today should eventually be available.
Then again, there might be a respite out there for companies that want to create PDFs of their old works but don’t want the costs associated with them:
Pirates!
Yes, pirates. There are websites out there where you can find hundreds of old RPG books illegally cut down and scanned to PDF available to to public. I would hope that most gamers with a conscience refuse to make use of them, but they still exist. it might well be possible for a company facing exorbatant costs to get product electronic could find serviceable PDFs of most of their line on these sites, download them, and save themselves the costs associated with doing the work themselves.
What’re the pirates going to do? Sue them?
I enjoy chasing the cool new stuff of today too much to be a good customer for these efforts, but I’m glad they’re serving people who want them.
i’d love to have more OOP stuff in PDF format first, POD second. i already have more than one bookshelf groaning under the weight of old stuff. i wish i could get more current works in PDF format as well.
better yet, print + PDF.
You make a good point about the pirates rick. It’s one of the reasons I don’t like PDF files. I know people who have gigs full of these though. I’d hate to see an RPGIAA though.
The one problem with those PDFs is they are not print quality. They are probably at 72 dots per inch, which looks horrible when printed. Having something at least at 150 makes it look “decent”, but you really really really need something at 300 dpi to make it look ok. Even then some truly detailed high quality art can come out grainy. When we upload to Lulu we have to do it through their FTP server, and that is just with the beta edition of our book. The images in there are compressed to 72 dpi (for space), and they don’t look good. In a final product that wouldn’t cut it. Of course, it is a better option for some companies doing OOP books, than investing the money into reproducing. Still, one copy of the book, a high power scanner, a trained monkey and some cleanup of the scanned images, can produce something print worthy from an old book. It’s not going to be as high quality, but it’ll be serviceable.
I guess that is the thing. With an OOP market, much like with rare videos or audio files, people are willing to accept a little bit of loss of quality to get something that is perceived of as rare.
I think a truly great way for POD on OOP books to evolve in is to install one of the Print on Demand kiosks they are developing in gaming stores, and then print OOP books out with a percentage of the profits going to the FLGS. The FLGS gets some cash, the publisher gets some cash, the user gets the older book they want.
For OOP print stuff, doesn’t matter much to me. I can’t think of anything OOP that I want enough to bother. However, there are several PDFs that I would consider buying as print-on-demand, but not as PDFs. I don’t really like PDFs. So yeah, going forward, I can see it working well.
“This guy I know” has a few PDFs, and some of them are as John Arcadian says, absolute crap. Most are quite readable, and print out rather well, if you’re into hardcopy. Others are OCR’d, corrected, and bookmarked, and have the errata and web enhancement added on.
Don’t get me wrong – I don’t condone using a pirated PDF in lieu of the original book or legit PDF. But there are times when the original book is very expensive or impossible to find, and no official PDF was made. (“Greyhawk – From the Ashes” is a great example, as are some of the more obscure games.)
i know people who have gigs of pirated music, video, PDFs, and software, and for the vast majority, it may as well be gigs of random zeros and ones with interesting file names. they don’t look at them, they don’t use them, its just a collector’s game. the owners of the eiffel tower might as well worry about who’s got a vacation photo of the thing, devaluing their property.
just my 2cp, value it as you will.
Speaking of piracy I have to DISAGREE – I see alot of pirated material, no matter if it is music, movies or RPG books and all this has changed with me is that I spend MORE money on the above mentioned cultural productions.
I spent about 100 dollars a year on gaming books before pirating, nowadays I spend around 600 dollars. The same “ratios” can be said for movies and music – sure, I might pirate alot more than what I really buy, but that is because I want to own QUALITY material. I see my downloads not as something I would’ve bought ANYWAY, but as a preview copy – I read up on a recently released book and judge if it’s worth buying or not.
I don’t see a benefit in having out-of-print books. What’s the point of a book that no one can read [anymore]?
What interests me more is to what extent people are going to adopt things like Lulu. Print on demand has the potential to really blow open opportunities in the pen-and-paper industry, but will it end up being successful or will it just result in another 3.0-style boom of products in the market that ultimately comes to be regarded as kind of a negative thing?
Absoutely a great idea. How else can we keep playing 7th Sea (greatest swashbuckling game ever) without the out-of-print resources?
(Abulia) “Back in the day,†before desktop layout programs and digital printing, products were laid out in physical form (a master), turned into plates, and then used to create books. Creating a PDF version of an OOP product isn’t as easy as loading it up and hitting “Export to PDF.â€
Interesting — I didn’t know that. I assumed there were differences, but that there was still something convertible-to-PDF involved. I guess that’s why WotC went with manually-scanned ESDs for all of their older products, which makes sense.
Piracy is a tricky one. Much like ancient video games that are no longer supported, I don’t see most RPG companies getting too upset if folks pirate games from the 80s — but in-print stuff is definitely a different situation.
And if more companies made time for the Lulu/PDF approach to their back catalogue — even if there isn’t all that much money in it in many cases — then folks who don’t currently have a legitimate way to get those products would have another option.