bullgod's page

As other people are pointing out, do not knock the value of the free PDF with the subscription.

I'm not. If you are in the States it's great.

I don't value early access of completeness or reliability subscription grants. This is either not important or not an issue for me. I appropriate others do care about these factors.

But is the UK these "free" PDFs would cost me 3 times the price.

Forgive me if I'm a little cheesed of to think that US subscribers get a better deal than I can.

If there were insurmountable reasons for this then I'd suck it up just like the old days, but I see other markets changing: managing to ship physical media around the globe and supply electronic copies as part of the package and wonder why Paizo don't. Especially when in most every other area they've been so progressive.

What I'm paying for is the early access and the certainty of not missing anything. My FLGS doesnt get everything in and there are always issues with Amazon when a book is released.

Ok, I would contend that you are paying for completism and early access but only because you seem to have little alternative.

I'm not a completist, and there are other [legitimate] ways to get early access which I won't go into here. I've never had an issue with Amazon selling Paizo or any of the other online retainers are available in UK which are just as cheap.

So I amend my earlier remark to their is little point to subscription for international buyers if there is a reliable alternative, especially for bulky items.

But Paizo claim that the free PDFs are there to keep the subscribers happy.

You are apparently already happy because you see it as reliable and timely. It would be interesting to know if the absence of the free PDFs would cause you to stop your subscription. That is the contention from Paizo.

I'm unhappy because I have to buy everything I want twice. I can't imagine I'm alone. Thus there is a market here that Paizo are not servicing, and we know what happens then.

Legendarius wrote:

That said, on the issue of getting a PDF to go with your hardcopy of a book, couldn't Paizo make something available to FLGS/comic stores/mom and pop businesses where the customer could get a free PDF or discounted PDF when they buy a physical book from the store, or alternately just get the PDF from the store?

We don't even offer that option to people who purchase individual print editions here at paizo.com. Free PDFs are the main perk—and, in some cases, the *only* perk—of several of our subscription lines; offering that to anybody else would thus diminish the value of the subscription. And if there's one thing you should take away from my responses in this thread, it's that keeping up our subscription numbers is a key strategy for staying in business.

My issue is that for international buyer that is no point in signing up to subscription because the postage costs from US make it prohibitive. Therefore no perk at all.

I buy from Amazon UK or my FLGS and they have to carry the import costs, which they can do because they (or their supplier) are doing so in bulk.

This is especially problematic if the subscription line that you want to follow is minis, pawns or hardcovers. More bulk, more cost, less incentive.

Example: Core Rule Book. From Paizo: $50, shipping to UK $52 = $102. From Amazon UK £26.25 ($42 @ £1 = $1.60), and free shipping. That's a difference of $60 on one book! Now multiply this over the lifetime of a subscription.

However if Paizo were to sell (via Amazon UK or FLGS) a "Deluxe International Edition" (i.e. exactly the same book but with PDF download voucher) for an additional cost I'd have bought that.
Lets not kid ourselves here - there's a big elephant in the room - most people reading this can find a less than legitimate copy of the PDF if they look hard enough.

All the discussion previously only applies to America. I'd like to give Paizo more of my money, in exchange for PDFs. I ideally want both media but if I can only have only I'll take the physical copy, bought on my local continent.

If there is one the that Paizo should take from this thread is that the subscription is no use to the international buyer.