Eric Flint's experience with the Baen Free Library is fascinating but crucially limited in applicability:

Baen treats all its electronic activity as advertising for the print books, which are its real source of profits, and

Baen has a great many titles on the market at any given time.

Those who sell only electronic products and who sell only a few products can therefore not treat all of Baen's experience as directly relevant. If you budget for your PDF stuff as promotional expenses, then sure, the money you make on it is nice but unessential. It's very different if that is what you've got to sell. In these cases, the piracy of something that someone would otherwise buy hurts a lot more than it does in the case of someone like Baen.

Now, I do think that there's a visible core of e-book pirates who are irrelevant to those of us with an interest in selling stuff electronically. Back in college in the mid-1980s I had some friends really seriously into cracking Commodore 64, Apple II, and Amiga computer games. I vividly remember the weirdness I felt upon realizing that these guys had literally hundreds of discs of games they'd never play and in fact had no interest in or knew much about. The point was to have the big collection. The same aesthetic pretty clearly applies to collecting e-books now, with folks moving more volumes than they can possibly read. This is about the collection as an artifact in itself rather than about its contents.

The folks most likely to hurt electronic sales are the less visible ones, who actually are selecting on the basis of content.

Can I say something before this thread is totally closed? Two words:

Added value

If you are selling your own stuff, you can keep track of who is buying - right? Give them free access to things, maybe gaming aids in PDF form, maybe even giving away some supplements. All they need to do is to buy it from you and you'll give them access to some "exclusive stuff". Sure that exclusive stuff will leak to Kazaa sooner or later, but people will always feel that they are being treated well because they paid for it. Instead of looking around for a pirated version on the net they get it immediately.

Further on, the people who get the pirated versions that consider maybe supporting you by buying the game is given an extra incentive.

People love being treated as important customers. I believe a lot of people would think it's worth PAYING for that feeling.

How do the Linux distributors earn money? By selling support.

Sure, there will always be people who don't care for these things but I'm sure they would never buy it anyway. I believe the thing about "collecting e-books" is spot on.

Ryan,

While I understand your position, man, when I read this:

They can give me as much of a hard time as they like. I am ignoring it. I am running my company like a businesss (and I know a great deal about marketing, competition, etc).

I've split the above posts from Kazaa, piracy, and your PDF game. It's a little confusing because I think Marco was responding to older posts thinking that they were new ones (correct me if I'm wrong, Marco).

Bruce, I appreciate your point greatly, but please note that I had closed the thread during the discussion. I'm the Forge content moderator, and one of our rules here is that when I say, "This thread is closed," no one is to post to it further. You're welcome to start new threads, of course.

In this case, I think both Christoffer and Marco were under the impression that the whole thread had started up since they'd last visited. It's just this sort of confusion - plus the attempt to keep discussions delimited in time - that keeps me pretty stern about the policy.

Everyone, please feel free to post to this thread to follow up on Bruce's point. However, Ryan's points on the previous thread are, in my view, not of general interest (he states as much several times). Let's stick with the current topic.

Best,
Ron

Bruce Baugh wrote: In these cases, the piracy of something that someone would otherwise buy hurts a lot more than it does in the case of someone like Baen.

I think the argument would go, Raven, that there's a spectrum of honesty, and one of interest in the product. At some point of cross, a person might be interested enough to buy a product that's available, but also dishonest enough to take it if it's presented to them for free.

Consider the driven collector. He'll do anything to ensure that his collection is complete. But it's expensive. So he feels he has to cut corners. So he buys what's only available that way, and steals what else he can.

Is that so farfetched?

OTOH, I'd argue that it's far from common. This is one of those cases where personal want creates a larger percieved threat than exists, I think.

More importantly there's little to be done about it. It's essentially a cost of doing business that you have to calculate in, just as retailers calculate "shrink". Which is an euphamism for goods dissapearing to shoplifting and employee theft. No retailer closes his doors because of this. They just add a negative line on the spreadsheet, and carry on. Sure there are some security meansures you can take, but they're only so effective. In the end there's some amount that's just less costly to allow to go on than to try and thwart.

Moving to an all internet venue turns out to prevent some shrinkage in terms of shoplifting, but has it's own costs. Good business is calculating these costs accurately and going with the plan that results in the largest bottom line. And I doubt that the cost of piracy in terms of lost opportunity makes PDF any less viable than any other method of distribution (I wonder how many copies of games dissapear in warehouses).

That all said, I think there are definitely other things you can argue about PDF viability than piracy. Like the fact that people with computers can't use 'em. It's all cost/benefit analysis.

Mike

Sorry, Ron, I missed the thread-closure notice. Thanks for the spinoff.

Greetings greyorm,

greyorm wrote: In my opinion, and that's all this is here, someone too cheap to purchase the product wouldn't have bought it anyways -- because they are too cheap to purchase the product.

Kester Pelagius wrote:

greyorm wrote: In my opinion, and that's all this is here, someone too cheap to purchase the product wouldn't have bought it anyways -- because they are too cheap to purchase the product.

Let's examine that remark for sec.

On the Baen site there are a number of novels, mostly the first in a series, which you can read online or DL to read at your leisure.

If I grab one does that mean I am too cheap to go out and buy it?

Felicitations Le Joueur,

Le Joueur wrote: I'm fond of Remington's idea; you give away the shaver and sell the razors. I still haven't figured out how that would work in this business.

For the record, Fang has the right of it.
Thanks, Fang!

Hey Kester,

Kester Pelagius wrote:

Le Joueur wrote: I'm fond of Remington's idea; you give away the shaver and sell the razors. I still haven't figured out how that would work in this business.

My idea went like this: Create a PDF of the basic 'setting' and provide a few starters, plot seeds, ideas, and etcetera that will allow the PDF (a 'rules lite' game in and of itself) to be playable. But put it out just as that, a rules lite system for use with a setting.

Then, sell the 'support'. In modules, a 'fuller' system with a more richly detailed environment beyond the thumbnail provided and...

...Also, though I don't know how well this would go over, I thought maybe you could also have 'rule packs'. For instace put out a set of plug in (but detailed) 'magic rules' or 'steam punk' rules, something like that.

...But, seriously, what do you think?

Howdy Le Joueur,

Great analogy, BTW.

Le Joueur wrote: Spreading the rules across multiple supplements, in my experience, has always been lampooned as a bad idea. To me, it always rang of bad design; saying, "Look! We published before we'd properly playtested."

Le Joueur wrote: No, to me the rules in toto would probably be the shaver. Those free shavers always came with at least one blade. Read that as a 'setting' (or a crystal sphere or a Genre Expectation), but the important point is that the ruleset isn't fragmented.