So I released the Diaspora PDF this morning. Well, actually I put it up at RPG Now and Lulu last night and then went to bed. Nine hours or so later I got up and composed the announcement and posted it around a few places. When I checked my revenues I discovered I had sold twenty copies while I slept.

This is pretty similar to our release of the hardcover in August of 2009 — we posted it and went to bed and woke up to (I forget exactly) 20-30 copies sold already.

This really chokes me up — the idea that there are people out there waiting for our work. Clicking refresh on our storefront so they can be first (or at least first day) adopters. That’s pretty awesome. If I was drunk I would speak more about this (I LOVE YOU MAN) but I’m not so I won’t. Tonight’s game night, though, so there’s a risk of sudden maudlin around midnight. Watch this space.

The PDF itself is not what I planned to make but we did a lot of research before proceeding. I won’t deconstruct the why so much here because I’ve nattered on about formats and objectives and audiences before and waffled between not selling a PDF at all to selling a very specifically constructed PDF to sticking to reflowable eBook formats to…well all over the place. I’m a generalist and a synthesist. This is my nature.

In the end we built a PDF from a branch of the source data for the hardcopy version. It adds some new text (a little blurb about rights and a change to the copyright page) but retains the pagination of the hardcopy. So there is perfect page correlation between the PDF and the hardcopy. This was a goal and this was a cheap way to do it. That means the page sizes are 6×9 just like the book, but that also means that it looks pretty good when printed on home-quality print gear because you get a larger typeface out of the deal when you blow up our original intent to letter-sized paper. Cool!

It’s big at 35 megabytes or so, but all of the tools that flattened images and got it down to 6 megabytes also stripped all my bookmarking an links. I had to pick a priority there and from the beginning a priority was additional functionality over a simple “save as” from InDesign, so it’s big.

There are five categories of bookmarks. There is the expected Chapter section which contains a bookmark for the beginning of each chapter, the index, and the table addenda. There is a Sidebar section which contains a bookmark for every sidebar. There is a Tables section which contains a bookmark for every table in the book. There is a Spacecraft section with a bookmark for each of the spacecraft that we detailed, and the title includes the technology level and the name of the ship (which usually indicates purpose) so that should be a pretty fast way to start a fight. Finally, and most masturbatory, there is a Fiction section that bookmarks to each little blurb of microfiction, because I actually used that a fair bit to find those weird little moments of jargon or idiom that I remember enjoying writing.

Finally there are a bunch of internal links. I tried to find all of the “see this” moments in the text and link them to their references. I probably missed a couple (search and eyeball can’t guarantee coverage) but what I got looks pretty useful. There are also a small number of outgoing web links.

There is no DRM and no watermark. I really hate the idea of punishing legitimate customers in order to attack a body of users that are not all that affected by it. And who probably won’t even play it. One thing I know from this last eight months, though, is that a lot of you are playing it and it sounds like you are digging it. So this is intended as another tool at the table. It’s built for use. Use it!

–BMurray