With the recent WotC pulling their PDFs (for piracy on the surface of it) a number of brick and mortar game store owners have been, well, less than shocked. One might say they have been indignant. Marcus King, a self-professed Entertainment Store not a Game store owner, recently posted an article on IVC, outlining how he thought that publishers offering discounts on print-pdf titles should extend that to retailers on print titles. This is sort sighted to say the least. Furst, some of the most basic assumptions are questionable. The basis that most retailer who object to PDF sales is that they cut into print book sales. Companies like Baen and Harper-Collins have experiments running that are showing that PDF sales do not affect print sales, except possibly, positively. This concurs with my personal experience over the last 5 years. I have found that PDFs released ahead of print tend to aid my sales. It is important to realize that this is not a universal standard. HinterWelt is a small press company and reaching out to gamers is important. Sometimes it is good to push the boundaries and seed interest ahead of a title. For a company like Wizards, it would be better to time the release at the same release date for print and pdf. This would encourage the maximum number of print sales but also allow touching the electronic market with the same product.
Second, I believe it shows a woeful misunderstanding of the market segment by Marcus. It shows that he believe the market to be mature and merely an alternative channel. It would be a better analysis, in my opinion, to say that pdfs are a competing channel, not a complementary or supplementary one. As we progress with readers like the Kindle and E-Book, we will see this become more and more prevalent. You will always have a market for paper books but you will see people who want that ability to search books, one of the primary benefits of the PDF and having no comparable likeness in print books, leaping to the fore. These distinctions are held back as we are linked to our computers and laptops. It is really a case of what you are reading, a novel or a reference book. RPGs make better reference books in my opinion and thus lend themselves well to e-formats.
Finally, and most importantly, Marcus seems to believe that there is no way for retailers to participate in the pdf market. I can think of three off the top of my head. Guild of Blades has a retail store that prints PDFs for customers who legally obtained them. Another would be to host a small pdf store on your store site, get content specific to your store, that your customers would be interested in. Finally, a manual sale of USB drives with collections that could be customized to the store and their clientele. I imagine if I gave it some research and deeper thought I could come up with even more. The point being, retail stores could be involved today if they wanted to be. Unfortunately, and I have been on the retailer end when I owned two stores back in the 90s, you get into the mentality very easily, that the publisher does everything with a product. Your job is to sell it. These solutions would have more to do with an active role by the retailer.
In the end, I can say with confidence that the HinterWelt and our print sales have been helped a great deal due to PDFs. It has given us exposure and brought customers into stores to buy our products who would never have been there. I know many retailers who understand this. Still, I can wish it were more.
