I actively do not want the means of reproduction of the Diaspora book. If that’s what the Diaspora PDF ends up being, it will diminish my interest in the purchase.

What I want most is a modified layout designed to maximize usability via the twin-but-happily-similar media of the consumer-printer page (landscape format) and the computer screen.

The reason I’m waiting for the PDF is in fact just price. I am curious about the game and would like to read it, but the odds that I’d run it anytime soon are vanishingly small, so even at the softcover price, which is tempting, in the cold light of day I just can’t justify it.

If the money of someone who admits he probably isn’t going to actually run the game seems to you to be worth leaving on the table, I understand your position. But it’s hard to watch you tied up in knots over not wanting to sell something that nobody actually wants to buy from you. We want the game; we don’t need the means to produce the book. At all.

I think that part of the cachet of Diaspora is the sense of creative pride that surrounds the game conceptually and as an artifact. The idiosyncrasies of the final product might limit the breadth of its appeal, but I suspect those same traits increase the depth of appreciation on the part of those that buy it. True Fans tend to want a sense of feedback and responsiveness from the creators they embrace. In addition to the tangible value for fans of being able to own the game in electronic form, there’s a psychological value in being listened to by its creators. Which is probably a long winded way of saying “community” as Mr. Hicks did above.

I imagine the members of VSCA have always valued their creative autonomy and ownership of Diaspora, so that’s a familiar asset on an emotional level–pride, aesthetic appreciation, and so forth. The broader community of Diaspora users, on the other hand, is a newer phenomenon whose emotional value to VSCA is probably uncertain. More than sales and dollars and cents (all of which has been interesting reading), I think that’s the crux of this particular publishing issue: can the emotional satisfaction of acting on behalf of your fledgling game community compensate for any creative anxieties over the quality and ultimate uses of an electronic format?

I’m guessing that, with some finessing, you will find a happy compromise.

I think even with the print-only BOOK, you’ll find that a section of the audience is already engaging with the TEXT. For example, I’ve found myself writing out in Word some sections of the Diaspora BOOK, so I could copy/paste parts into discussions about rules I’ve been having with my friends, as they get used to FATE as an overall system.

One friend, in Australia, I bought a copy of the BOOK for as a Christmas present, and in the meantime he had questions about things like Aspects, so the TEXT was relevant during the period where the BOOK was pending. Other friends have tendencies to Not Read The Book. In their case, the PDF product would not serve them either… but the ability to port across sections of TEXT into the discussion *is* useful, because they learn through discussing things with other people they game with, particularly with examples. Which suggests that part of the value of a PDF or otherwise electronic-product is the enhanced portability of TEXT for communication purposes.

The BOOK is a variant of the TEXT specificially designed to be an awesome experience of that TEXT, and it achieves that. However, the BOOK as expression of TEXT goes hand-in-hand with some pragmatic limitations when it comes to imparting the information which is in the TEXT. The SRD is extremely handy, because it boils down the rules component of the TEXT.

However, you lose the illustrative component of the TEXT, which is a significant part of what makes Diaspora sing – in part because the examples are very well done. That’s a handy tool for localising the players who learn through communication and cited examples of TEXT, rather than engaging in the BOOK or PDF themselves. Regarding such folks, they *need* a community to be part of, in order to learn new games, and different angles into the TEXT gives inroads to that.

What I think I’m leaning towards is that Fred’s “provide as many avenues into the data contained in the TEXT as possible” approach might be a way of throwing a wide enough net that the audience – who are already set on engaging with the TEXT potentially outside of the BOOK context, or the PDF context – have easy tools with which to adapt it to their purposes.

I still think it’d be entirely reasonable not to release a PDF version of Diaspora for the reasons which have been under discussion. People are still going to find ways to get into the TEXT as they need to, so the lack of a PDF isn’t a slammed door on that front. The flipside which occurred to me is that if they’re already getting into the TEXT, then perhaps there are ways you can be part of that.

- The Unshaven.

Regarding the all-important philosophical question, “okay fine now what do we do and what do we make?” — one that rarely ever gets reached in an internet discussion so I’m pretty proud of this here now — I think there is a space between 1 and 2 that is both comfortable, fun, and ethical (meets the obligations we have and set for ourselves):

Release a PDF of the book with its existing layout preserved but in the latest Acrobat format (so as to support bookmarks). Generate bookmarks. Turn all URLs into real hyperlinks and link up all “see XX” references with internal hyperlinks. There’s no re-flowing so we don’t need the page marking but we could do it anyway and save people viewing partial pages from correlation issues. It’s just a little typing. Ideally this won’t force a re-index but we can deal with that if it happens.

So we’d have a bookmarked and linked document that closely matches the print presentation with some work, but not the sort of work that would go into a reflowable format version, which I haven’t been pleased with in experimentation anyway. It would suck on some readers because the typeface is small, but it will look swell on, say, the iPad because it’s 6×9 so it will be zoomed on that device.

I will of course need a couple of iPads on VSCA accounts in order to do this right but we can talk about that.