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Electronic Publishing and Me
I consider myself an early adopter of electronic publishing. No small part of it has to do with spending far too much of my life on the internet, downloading fan-produced netbooks and campaign backgrounds. In the late 90s, Hero Games (my pusher of choice) was one of the first publishers to try selling gaming material in PDF format via their Hero Plus line. While the line turned out some good products, it was fatally flawed from the outset. The broadband revolution was still a few years off, and there were no e-commerce channels out there at the time devoted to selling e-books. Hell, writable CDs were still a novelty. As a result, the product line consisted of PDFs sold on floppy disks. Granted, the price was right (about ten bucks for a book), but the books consisted of very simply laid out text, a simple cover, maybe a few character illos, and nothing else. Because, whatever you produced, had to fit on a floppy. Or maybe two.
Of course, for the time, this was pretty impressive stuff. But buying them depended on either finding a game store that was willing to order hard-to-display floppy disks, or order them directly from Hero and wait on getting a floppy via snail mail. All in all, a highly sub-optimal set of circumstance further hampered by the slow unraveling of Hero during that period.
When CDs became mainstream, I picked up the ever-awesome Dragon collection, and killed more time than I should admit at work reading old issues when I should've been doing something productive.
Eventually, everyone got broadband, someone invented RPGnow, and any publisher worth his salt makes PDF versions of their games available online. Many publishers are PDF-only. But the current state of affairs is hardly news to anyone reading this. The point is, I've got a lot of gaming material in electronic format, mostly PDFs. It's generally cheaper, and Iuz knows, they take up less space, but there are problems. Portability is the big one. Sure, I can burn a file to CD or put it on a jump drive, but I've still been shackled to a computer in order to read it. Printing it out costs paper and inevitably means binding. There was a time when I had access to a comb binder, which keeps the bulk down a bit, but generally, I'm stuck with the 3-ring model, which takes up a bunch of space on my shelves and generally clutters my study.
More recently, I invested in a nice 150 GB portable drive to hold my gaming stuff, which means I can take vast chunks of my library with me and hook it up to a laptop. Of course, this still means toting a laptop around, which doesn't help with bathroom reading at all and is more often than not difficult at lunch, my two key reading times away from home. Also, reading PDFs on a laptop screen isn't that great. What makes for good book layout seldom makes for good online layout, and the vast majority of PDFs are the final print layout files. Which means more printing and binding, or worse, buying both and electronic and print version of a book.
I am pleased to say I've finally found a solution I can wholeheartedly embrace: the Amazon Kindle DX. It's the larger version of the Kindle and, unlike the earlier models has native PDF support. I received one as a birthday present yesterday and it's a wonder to behold. Moving PDFs over to it is as simple as plugging in a USB cable and dragging and dropping. The display is big enough to see full page layouts legibily, and the graphics are rendered in a very clean grayscale. It's "only" got about a 3 gig storage capacity, but that's a LOT of PDFs right there (the entire Dragon collections, for instance). It weighs less than a trade paperback, so it's perfect to take to lunch OR the bathroom. In short, I'm entirely sold on it.
Of course, for the time, this was pretty impressive stuff. But buying them depended on either finding a game store that was willing to order hard-to-display floppy disks, or order them directly from Hero and wait on getting a floppy via snail mail. All in all, a highly sub-optimal set of circumstance further hampered by the slow unraveling of Hero during that period.
When CDs became mainstream, I picked up the ever-awesome Dragon collection, and killed more time than I should admit at work reading old issues when I should've been doing something productive.
Eventually, everyone got broadband, someone invented RPGnow, and any publisher worth his salt makes PDF versions of their games available online. Many publishers are PDF-only. But the current state of affairs is hardly news to anyone reading this. The point is, I've got a lot of gaming material in electronic format, mostly PDFs. It's generally cheaper, and Iuz knows, they take up less space, but there are problems. Portability is the big one. Sure, I can burn a file to CD or put it on a jump drive, but I've still been shackled to a computer in order to read it. Printing it out costs paper and inevitably means binding. There was a time when I had access to a comb binder, which keeps the bulk down a bit, but generally, I'm stuck with the 3-ring model, which takes up a bunch of space on my shelves and generally clutters my study.
More recently, I invested in a nice 150 GB portable drive to hold my gaming stuff, which means I can take vast chunks of my library with me and hook it up to a laptop. Of course, this still means toting a laptop around, which doesn't help with bathroom reading at all and is more often than not difficult at lunch, my two key reading times away from home. Also, reading PDFs on a laptop screen isn't that great. What makes for good book layout seldom makes for good online layout, and the vast majority of PDFs are the final print layout files. Which means more printing and binding, or worse, buying both and electronic and print version of a book.
I am pleased to say I've finally found a solution I can wholeheartedly embrace: the Amazon Kindle DX. It's the larger version of the Kindle and, unlike the earlier models has native PDF support. I received one as a birthday present yesterday and it's a wonder to behold. Moving PDFs over to it is as simple as plugging in a USB cable and dragging and dropping. The display is big enough to see full page layouts legibily, and the graphics are rendered in a very clean grayscale. It's "only" got about a 3 gig storage capacity, but that's a LOT of PDFs right there (the entire Dragon collections, for instance). It weighs less than a trade paperback, so it's perfect to take to lunch OR the bathroom. In short, I'm entirely sold on it.