Ransom is a good option. It’s not the only good option, but it’s a good option. It does require you to figure out what you want to be paid for the PDF for its entire lifetime of existence, though — which is part of why I have not personally tried for a ransom approach for any products, yet.

You could use a formula that has worked well for Evil Hat: Figure out what a reasonable price on a softcover* version of the product would be. Charge half of that for the PDF. (I’ve expounded in the past, at length, on why I think “half” is the perfect place to price an e-product.) You can slide that around by a buck or so in either direction, carefully.

* I say softcover because the cover price pressure that the cost of producing a POD hardcover entails is excessive. Looking at what you’d be inclined to charge for the softcover POD, then, lands closer to a fair market perception, as it were. A mass-printed hardcover can achieve a price point that you can more comfortably halve, by contrast.

There are other ways you can engineer this: look at the profit you get from Lulu, and assume that Lulu’s PDF cut (25%) is a good median for the venues in which you might sell (ranging from 20% to 35%, tho the lower end gets lower if you’re running your own webstore). Take the profit, multiply that by 1.33 (4/3rds as inversion of 3/4ths), and that’s what you’d have to set the price of a PDF for a PDF sale to generate you the same revenue.

Apply this and the other methods and I think you’ll find yourself with a nice tight range of possible pricing for a theoretical PDF product of your current print-only one.

You could use this to then make individual sales, or fold it into your ransom: “I’d be happy with 500 lifetime sales of the PDF” = 500 times whatever your individual sale price would be as your ransom figure.

Sounds like a plan!

Fred, while all of those are good ways to estimate value for the PDF, they don’t really strike to the heart of the matter, which is that our resistance is not entirely (or even mostly) fiscal. So we will need to stick a finger in the air and put a price on something entirely nebulous so that, if it doesn’t make the ransom, we can comfortably say we’re cool with that result (today). We can estimate how much it would pay us not to and how much it might cost us to, but ultimately there are two major hurdles there: first, the error bars are huge and unresolvable but, more importantly, it’s not about the money. We need to convert whatever it is into dollars to proceed though. I doubt there will be a lot of real math in that. :D

Oh, I’m entirely aware that your valuation isn’t “mathable”, and sometimes neither is mine, but I find it useful to run through the mathable versions of the exercise as a way of loosening up my brain around the question. It’s like a writing exercise to get the authorial juices flowing — but applied to pricing.

I buy that, Fred. I’m sure it will be part of the discussion. We’re at a place to estimate the softcover margin, too — should be doing the correction editing this weekend I hope, which gives me a text to put between soft covers.

My take on this is: Fred is offering some very sound tactical advice, while your fundamental problems are still at the strategic level. Thinking about things at the high strategic level is a lot of hard work, and lots of companies just avoid it all together. Lots more stop at “maximize profit” as their driving high-level strategy. It’s an easy thing to screw up in all sorts of ways, and I applaud your courage in trying to hack away at it.

I think that shines more light, Roger, thanks. For the Diaspora authors and certainly for me as VSCA Publishing, “maximising profits” is best accomplished by working as a research engineer in the transportation business. :D So I resist it as a motive for our games except as a heuristic. And there’s no question that this (as you say, tactical) heuristic is useful and a half.

I’m still not clear on what your resistance to the PDF is. What is there to lose by releasing a PDF? You’ll have some production costs (time and headaches included), perhaps some cannibalizing of the print product. And then what? Maybe I’m not reading or comprehending what you are saying, but if it’s not money, what is the argument against releasing a PDF? And What are these “unresolvable error bars”?

Walkerp, our resistance is to the idea of giving away the means of production of the book. It doesn’t strictly have anything to do with money but rather it degrades the book-as-artifact. Now in this age I think it is well argued that this is not worth what it once was, but it’s still meaningful to us. The unresolvable error bars are on efforts to predict the future — like when someone makes a choice and then sees a decline in sales and then claims to know the cause or the percentage of the impact from the cause. We can guess and guess well, but we need to be clear to ourselves that we are guessing and probably confirming a bias.

This is interesting grappling, whatever comes from it.

More mundanely, Kickstarter (kickstarter.com) is what Mr Stolze has been using lately. As a pledger on three projects of his on Kickstarter, I can say that it does the job well.

Not for nothing. But I regularly buy $20-$30 pdf’s of the games I am running just so I can cut and paste things into other documents I use for the game. To me that ability is invaluable, which is why I would rather see a high priced pdf then no pdf at all.

And I also have never run a game without a hardcopy. The pdf is purely convenience of game prep for me.

My pricing is generally what Fred said, but my experience does not include any importance attached to the book-as-artifact.

Sorry! I inadvertently hit return before finishing! To continue…

Like you, I make far more money in the real world – I’m a senior Technical Writer for a multi-billion dollar company – than I could hope to make designing games, so I understand where you are coming from. I will add something you may not have thought of, though – people generally respect things they pay for, and do not respect things they are given free. I, for example, have had a free pdf of Ars Magica for many years. AM is one of the five most innovative games ever written, and I use and extend its innovations in my games, yet… I’ve never even looked at the pdf. Not once. On the other hand, pdfs I’ve paid for I use all the time, even if they are less than a tenth as important to what I do.

Just something to think about!

Best of luck with whatever your decision ends up being!

-clash

This may not be helpful, but…

I hate ransoms. With a passion. I have participated in some, but I generally don’t feel good about it. Either you feel that you have a product that people want to buy or you don’t. You find out for sure by putting your product on the market.

With PDFs, it seems to me to be a win/win. If no one buys it, then you haven’t really degraded the book-as-artifact, because, well, nobody is out there printing off copies of your book. If tons of people buy it, then you make a bundle of cash and your game gets evangelized. Given the minimal investment it takes to produce a PDF, this seems a no-brainer.

The main point is that it very obvious that fans of Diaspora (i.e., people who’ve already purchased the hardcopy) want PDFs of the game. I don’t think anyone would balk at paying for the PDF—I certainly have no expectation that I’m entitled to a free PDF just because I bought a hardcopy (and will buy another when the corrected printing is available).

That said, if this really is a big issue for VSCA… don’t release a PDF. You’ve got an excellent SRD up on the site, and that gets us fans 90% of the way there. (The PDF version Max Lambertini created is what my players are using right now.)

I can’t help but feel that you guys are clinging to an outdated way of thinking, like the record companies (though I clearly don’t ascribe the same malicious goals to you). I really don’t see how releasing a pdf will degrade the artifact value of a beautiful hardcopy value of Diaspora. If you love something, let it free! :)

I honestly can’t think of an RPG that I actually play that I only own in PDF (unless that’s the only medium in which it exists). If I like a game enough to run it, I buy a hardcopy.

Here’s my thoughts in detail, walkerp (and anyone else still listening). There’s enough here that it might make a complete post, but I don’t want to clutter the front page with beating this to death. First, walkerp, your impression that we are clinging to an outdated way of thinking makes sense from a user’s perspective, but the user’s perspective of what a PDF actually *is* is distorted by their usage of it. I think that this actually just hasn’t been thought about hard enough yet, and if there is anything outdated about the thinking it’s that the culture has been operating under a simplified model of what all this means for long enough that now we reflexively fail to examine in detail because we never did. Anyway, here goes, from my shakey bus-notes. There are two issues which are kind of the same thing but from different angles.

First though, two terms: BOOK is a physical thing. TEXT is a set of ideas. When I say BOOK I’m not talking about the ideas in the book, I’m talking about cardboard and paper and glue. This saves me saying “book-as-artifact”.

Okay, the PDF is a machine for making perfect copies of the BOOK. So, as soon as I release the PDF (even a single copy of it), no matter what the end-user’s intention for it is, there are certain powers that I suddenly lose. And these couple I list are not all of them — this needs to be thought about much more carefully before we even know what we’re losing. Anyway, for example, I lose (and I’m not saying I need or want these — I’m saying I certainly lose them so I better wonder if I need or want them):
* control over how many copies of the BOOK exist
* ability to take a version “out of print”
* knowledge of how many copies of a version exist

The user of the PDF values this machine for its accidental functions — it is pretty, it can be readily replicated, it is a high-fidelity representation of the TEXT, and it is convenient. But none of these are what the PDF is for and none are what I value it for. This mismatch is central to the mismatch in valuation of the PDF as a product for sale (when it is intended as the source for creation of a BOOK — this is not always the case and, as with Deluge, the valuation there is trivial).

See, the BOOK is the TEXT inextricably coupled with a delivery mechanism for the TEXT, and we created many aspects of that mechanism deliberately to create a certain experience for the end-user of the BOOK. And so when we release the PDF we also lose control over much of that experience because we are no longer providing that delivery mechanism. So that’s another power we lose that I don’t know the value of. I do know I care about it, though.

So I understand that the problem looks trivial from the user’s perspective, but that’s because it is. The user rarely sees the PDF as a machine for creating another machine (BOOK) that delivers a certain and planned kind of experience. Selling that machine for features it accidentally has changes what I have actually delivered to you and also changes my control over the BOOK. I don’t see valuing this as trivial in any sense. But you can also see how it’s not directly related to dollars in any interesting way too — I’m just asking myself, “How much do I need to get paid in order to surrender this probably incomplete list of powers?”

I think you’re detailing your side of the perspective very well, Brad, but I am not convinced you’re considering the user’s perspective except in a “simplified model” of its own kind. You talk about accidental functions, about outdated cultural perspectives, etc. Okay, I get that.

But you made a decision to sell your text in some fashion to begin with, and that creates a specific kind of relationship with the public, and it’s a relationship that I regard — professionally speaking — as carrying some obligations with it. (You probably don’t agree with what those obligations are, and I don’t have the kind of time necessary to detail them much.) Suffice it to say my own philosophy cleaves to providing the TEXT to the customer via as many mechanisms as are easily possible, and doing so as promptly as possible so as to give the customer the power to make the most of a collective, concurrent surge of excitement about the TEXT. To an extent, Diaspora is already aiming to miss this window with the delay on the PDF release, but it’s a fuzzy window at best.

As far as the PDF’s ability to deliver the means to reproduce the BOOK — well, so’s the BOOK. You can’t protect a power you’ve already given up. The number of pirated PDFs out there I see that are page by page scans of the original books tells me this. For most people getting the PDF printed up and bound is an expensive proposition, too, akin to photocopying the original book itself and paying the page by page fee to the copy-shop. (Yeah, they could upload it to Lulu and use that to produce a private copy, but I still think their aggregate payout is going to be similar to buying the physical book, so there’s incentive to just buy the physical object.) There are also plenty of strategies (some of which I don’t philosophically agree with, others which I see value in) for rendering a PDF a less-than-perfect way to reproduce the BOOK, if that’s truly a concern of merit here.

At any rate, you talk about a specific, planned experience with the book, here, but you stop at the limited horizon of the book itself when it comes to the experience. That is not what you have created, though. You’ve created a game, and you’ve created ideas, and both of those are themselves experiences that expand beyond that horizon. The experience that a customer has as a customer, too, is a part of that experience. To be a publisher, rather than someone who has created art for himself, is to consider all parts of that experience in aggregate, and to make decisions in the context of the market and what the customer community wants.

That’s the basis for why I usually shorthand all of this to an artist/publisher or philosopher/publisher divide (which is really a continuum, because Evil Hat for sure is not a 100% publisher venture, it’s just a strongly majority publisher venture). You can pile up all the molehills of your philosophic concerns into a great big virtual mountain to place between you and civilization, but that will always strike me (on my publisher side) as creating walls between you and the public to neither’s actual benefit.

So at the end of the day, for me, PDF delivery isn’t about any of what you’re talking about. It’s about supporting and building on the community of play that you’re tapping into. And having made the decision to publish, especially commercially publish, the mountain’s already been climbed, there.

I wonder how much of this angst would go away if you PDFed up the Diaspora SRD and marketed it just a bit as the ‘free PDF Diaspora sorta thing’. Maybe it would help; maybe not.

Well, there’s no angst here. :D

I don’t have a conclusion at this stage, and there seems to be some pre-supposition that I do. What I do have is a lot to wonder about that hasn’t been talked about much or has, worse, been dismissed without analysis. I don’t want to make a decision without thinking about it.

Fred, I think your perspective on the TEXT as part of the community of play is the most valuable discussion about the topic I’ve yet seen. I’d like to see a long long blog post about that some time. That’s compelling to me.

Roger, interestingly my experience so far is that providing something “equivalent” for free does not satisfy the consumer to nearly the degree that providing something (maybe the same and maybe equivalent) at a cost does. People are dying to pay for stuff.

See if you have the book, then all of the play-convenience interest is satisfied by the SRD and other free downloads. But this is, apparently, not satisfactory. Selling the PDF of the book, which would add very little to the free content from the consumer’s perspective, for twenty bucks probably would satisfy the interest. So there’s something very different going on here than just what people need in order to play conveniently. If we hadn’t used the OGL and published the SRD with a $15 price tag, we’d have delivered less content and probably heard zero complaint. So people seem to want to pay more than they care what they get.

There is certainly a sense in which we should just go with that.

People want reasonable confidence that everyone who talks about Diaspora is on the same page. While the SRD gets them — as I think you’ve said above — 90% or more of the way there, it does not get them 100% of the way there. I suspect people want to pay, and thus receive a delivery mechanism which has a high degree of reproductive fidelity to the physical source, so they gain access to membership in the community of equals, rather than as second-class “oh, I read the SRD” citizens.

Ahah, I think you nailed it there, Fred. Thank you.

I think the thing to remember about an SRD — at least for me — is that for many it simply amounts to an exceptionally verbose ad. It’s like flipping through the book in a store, but not actually picking the book up, in that way. It can create an incentive for people to buy the actual product, but it’s not *really* a substitute. And sure, some will run off, check it out from the library (as it were), photocopy the whole thing, and consider that to be “enough” (even though they’ll always be in that “I have a photocopied reproduction” set, second-classish). Plus the act of purchasing — which I think buzz and clash touch on above — isn’t just an act of financial investment, it’s also an act of emotional investment.

Oh yeah more good stuff — maybe I’ll need a new post after all. The fact that a purchase is both financial and emotional investment is a great observation. We see it with Deluge adopters — we’ve speculated that in paying for Deluge most customers have a sense of ownership and consequently resist sharing it in ways beyond what they consider fair, but also in ways beyond which they want to release “their” property. The idea that digital property is only interesting to the creator is certainly broken — when you sell it you make it (as property) important to the end-user as well. So you can leverage that ownership to meet your own needs as a publisher. Rich soil, as usual, Fred.

I use PDF’s mainly as reference and to allow my son to use his reader to assist him in digesting the text. It just needs to be well bookmarked and search able. As much as your interested in high tech role-playing the presentation is currently just about as low tech as it gets. I hope you reconsider a PDF option (if only for those with disability issues).

Brad, I think I see a possibility here for PDF release that averts at least some of your issues.

The PDF you already have is the blueprint for the book… But does that have to be the PDF you release? I recall reading something you wrote about electronic books not being what they ought to be, that is, to the extent they’re print books in electronic form, they are missing out on the potential of the electronic format.

Why not a PDF of Diaspora that takes full advantage of the format? Or, possibly, an non-PDF electronic format. Be as intentionally artistic in the electronic form as you were in the print form.

In this way, you aren’t simply giving away your blueprints. There would be enough difference between the printed text and the electronic text to make either a valuable thing in its own right.

Now, I can see not doing this because of time constraints, or lack of interest in that particular artistry, but would it not cover some of your objections?

Indeed, Lon, that has been part of our internal consideration as well. And in order to meet Scott’s interests — he mentions bookmarks specifically — we would have to make at least some changes that would make the PDF different from the one used as our book-construction machine (Lulu constrains us to a 2001 standard for PDF in order to print, and that’s pre-bookmarks and hyperlinks).

Halfjack, thanks for taking the time to explain your position in some depth. To me the words that resonate in your explanation are power and control. You seem quite concerned about your power and control over the text. For political, economic and aesthetic reasons, I think that concern over power, in my opinion, is what I am pointing at when I say outmoded.

I won’t get into the first two reasons, because it gets into a longer discussion of copyright law and all that stuff and I’m not even sure how I feel about it, let alone be able to discuss it with any authority.

I’m not very confident about my command of the aesthetic argument either, but I’ll just throw some observations out to you that I have noticed in my dealings with the designers of the world. The 20th century print production process contains a lot of ability for the designer to control the outcome and they have fought for this with tooth and nail. They tried to take this fight to the internet and it clashes directly with one of the fundamental principles of html and the web, that the user should have a great deal of control over how they consume text on their end. An interesting compromise was CSS. A terrible failure was flash, which many designers loved because of the control it gave them, but is thankfully probably on its way out (at least for controlling entire websites).

I think we will see this battle moving into the e-reader market. And I think the way you guys are thinking about it puts you on the vanguard of at least some of the ideas on how to approach it.

But I believe the real radical design development is going to come from people who recognize that you can separate the book and the text entirely and allow the user (or at least the end reader software or hardware) to be the one who makes the book (using your helpful definitions). This is a profound letting go for the traditional graphic designer, one that is full of anxiety clearly. But we are working more and more in a collaborative world, thanks to the internet, and I think we will be seeing design as much more of a dynamic synthesis than a static one-sided production.

If it is truly a negative thing for you and your team to have copies of your text in the wild that can then be used to create books that don’t meet your design requirements, then I think you should probably not release a pdf. But this is a position that I consider “outmoded” and one that will become less and less tenable as we move forward.

And again, your book, as you designed it, will always exist (well for a while, anyways) whether or not there are other book versions of your text out there. And in some ways, I would even argue that that would make your book even more valuable.

Again, I am seeing things synoptically with Fred here, Brad. The users are willing – no, demanding – to pay for the pdf-book because they *value* it. It’s a self sorting issue really. People who value the pdf will happily pay for it, and those who won’t pay for it won’t value it – it’ll end up on a terabyte drive somewhere with three thousand other pdfs they didn’t pay for and never look at. As Fred pointed out, by releasing the book, you have already released the means to reproduce the book. Releasing the pdf adds value to those who want to play it.

-clash

Just a brief note that dialing into the community aspects really seems to be where the gold is. I’m going to speculate that Brad’s use of the word “control” has only a tangential relationship to the model that, say, the Recording Industry “Artist’s” Association uses. That is, the outfits that like to slam people with charges under the DMCA and heavy infringement suits refer to control and power as the ability to subjugate others to doing things their way.

Given Brad’s musings on indexing, trying to find ways quite literally to have a community of text-users end up on the same page, I think he wants to control the artifact such that community benefit is maximized. As Fred has pointed out, this is an emotional as well as a technical issue. If we have a perfect e-format that aesthetically indexes a text so that community referencing is faithful, nonetheless it won’t exist in a vacuum. Other forces will have competing formats, so finding and influencing people’s emotional commitment to text-delivery machinery matters in terms of building the kind of community we want to see.

And a lot of that influence has to do with our weird systems of pricing.

Fascinating stuff, folks. This is half of why I feel gaming at the same table with Brad is such a privilege. (The other half is probably the excellent scotch.)

You’re just feeling all cuddly after that hot walrus action last night.

As an owner of a copy of your book who does not generally use PDFs, I have no horse in this race, but this is an interesting debate which relates to some things I’ve been thinking about myself recently about the openness of texts.

To explicitly reiterate a point made by Fred Hicks and walkerp, as soon as you publish, you lose control. If I had no consideration for the spine of my copy of Diaspora, I could be photocopying, scanning, OCRing, editing, colouring, rearranging, annotating and distibuting a new text of your book right now. The technology has changed, but this has been true since (at least) some Greek guy decided to write down an epic song and call it the Iliad.

As someone who worked as a graphic designer back at the dawn of desktop publishing, I think I understand your point of view in regards to giving up control. That said, I still have to go with most of what the others have been saying, particularly the idea that you’ve already given up most of that control simply by printing the book in the first place.

From a personal perspective, you’ve already released the parts of the book that I’d most likely get a PDF for (the charts and playsheets). I rarely use PDFs unless they’re the only way to get something, but then I’m in my late 30s and I tend to associate reading long texts on the computer screen with work. The rest of the people in my current gaming group are in their 20s and they seem perfectly happy reading complete PDFs on the computer. They would most likely buy PDFs of Diaspora if one was available.

So this is a fascinating conversation, and I feel I want to pipe in as one of the other authors of Diaspora to make it clear that while Brad chooses to be the public face of all of this, his opinion is shared in whole or in part by the rest of us. In a few places, I have piped in before: one of these was on Fred’s blog about Diaspora (“Obligation.pdf”). At that time, I presented a question that remained unanswered: with the srd, downloadable sheets, downloadable chapters, etc, all out there, what functionality aren’t we providing?

In response 18 above, Fred provides an answer: we are limiting the creation of an equal community. That’s a real claim, and it is one that deserves serious consideration. It seems right, and certainly pushes good buttons.

We’ve never said we wouldn’t do a pdf, but we want to do it right, and that we would consider it early in 2010 when we did a corrected paperback. That’s now, and the corrections are what I’ve been working on this week. So the discussion is timely. I understand wanting to meet the text/book distinction outlined here, and the articulation of citizenship in the game community is persuasive.

But I think the problems are mostly solved. That’s not to say a decision is made, but there are two clear alternatives available:

1. release the pdf of the corrected book. That would be comparatively easy, though we’d want to put in some indexing. VSCA loses the text/book distinction. All citizens of diasporaville are equal.

2. release a pdf-formatted version of the book. That’s a lot more work, involving reformatiing as well as indexing. More importantly, it’s work I wouldn’t be doing, and Brad would. We’ve solved the page-match problem, so players can say “bottom of 135″ and everyone is on the same page. VSCA maintains the text/book distinction, all citizens are equal.

Other options that exist (3. releasing in another e-format, 4. giving away the old, precorrected version, and 5. doing nothing) I’ll leave to the side.

Of these, I prefer 2 to 1 by a big margin, but I am not able to assume the bulk of the work it requires. I care about the book/text distinction, possibly more than the others, and a nice electronic format of some kind is a desirable goal. All that’s to say, this is not a dead question at the table by any means.

Toph, thanks for sounding and in public. I’m delighted that you find Fred’s community argument persuasive because I think it is the one really counter-balancing factor in the equation and I agree completely.

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.

I’ll add that that (#36) is not an announcement or a policy. All of this (especially the iPad bit) will have to go to internal discussion with all the authors before there’s any kind of concrete decision.

I’ve been finding the entire discussion fascinating, so I thought I’d put some offerings on the table.

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.

Very interesting discussion. I’m happy enough with my hardcover copy and the SRD, but I would be more likely to buy a corrected/revised edition in .pdf than in softcopy, depending upon the price differential.

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.

Aside: I’d love for the corrected printing to be available in hardcover, just like the original.

Buzz, that’s the most likely (100%) and earliest next Diaspora release. Next is the softcover, at very very near 100% and a few weeks later.

Fantastic! I’d heard a lot of talk about the “updated paperback” and was afraid there’d be no HC option.

As authors we want a hardcover on our shelves — so that’s for sure!

I am waiting for the PDF of Diaspora.

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 we have the PDF issue well in hand now. It will (inevitably) be a kind of compromise.