Suggestion - Make article text available

[Lord Storm]

I am a former subscriber to both Dungeon and Dragon magazine. I subscribed to Dragon for over 15 years and Dungeon on and off several times. I like the content because I’m primarily focused on D&D as a player/DM. However, I found that I just wasn’t able to use the content of the magazines they way I wanted. I never use the articles as printed, sometimes only a few spells or maybe changing a monster, NPC or a P class. Likewise when an adventure is posted in Dungeon I want to rewrite parts of it for my campaign. Spending time copying and/or retyping adventures, NPCs, spells and P classes just got to be a pain. I like reading the content, but I just wasn’t able to <use> the content the way that I want to, I feel that many players and DMs that I know are in the same position. I have also downloaded the art work that you are now posting, this is a very nice step in the right direction, but I doesn’t get to the core of my type of problem, easy access the written work so that I can modify it to suit what I want.

My suggestion is that the written content be made available to paid subscribers in an editable format (such as MS Word). I’m sure that there are issues such as rights with authors, however I’m sure that they could be over come if desired.

I realize this is a big risk because of the value of content. I’m not sure what you could do to stop the content from being passed around, however I know that I would become a subscriber again if I knew that I had <access to the text of articles>. I think the increased subscription rate would be a significant benefit to outweigh the disadvantages.

I also know that you sell the entire current issue as a pdf, I guess you have to weigh the sales there with printed sales. I’m not thrilled with the idea of paying for a magazine twice and a pdf does not really solve the specific problem I have since most pdfs are locked and don’t permit copying of text. You could start with a few articles more than one to two years old and then move forward on a monthly basis. You could just sell just older articles individually, 50 cents an article might be a good price point. This would allow picking and choosing and be a price point that I think would be a huge incentive versus copying and/or retyping.

In summary I think there is a market for articles/text that can be modified by the customer to suit a customers needs and that there is a large group of people willing to pay for it.

Later
Mark Middleton
Long time D&D and RPGA guy
Original creator of TSRs Spell Compendium Book “content”
IT Project Manager, PMP

[derek_cleric]

Lord Storm wrote:

My suggestion is that the written content be made available to paid subscribers in an editable format (such as MS Word).

Just get out your scanner and OCR the text of the sections that you need to rework. Instant Word document or as in my case, instant Open Office document.

--Ray.

[Jeremy Mac Donald]

derek_cleric wrote:

Lord Storm wrote:

My suggestion is that the written content be made available to paid subscribers in an editable format (such as MS Word).

Just get out your scanner and OCR the text of the sections that you need to rework. Instant Word document or as in my case, instant Open Office document.

--Ray.

What does OCR mean?

I'm defintly interested as I heavily modify and rewrite all the adventures I use. Now I'm pretty good at it but I'm not about to start ignoring things that would make my life easier.

[Koldoon]

Jeremy Mac Donald wrote:

What does OCR mean?

I'm defintly interested as I heavily modify and rewrite all the adventures I use. Now I'm pretty good at it but I'm not about to start ignoring things that would make my life easier.

Optical Character Reader.... typically software that allows you to scan pages of text and render it as a text based file rather than a picture based file.

- Ashavan

[Zherog]

Lord Storm wrote:

I also know that you sell the entire current issue as a pdf, I guess you have to weigh the sales there with printed sales. I’m not thrilled with the idea of paying for a magazine twice and a pdf does not really solve the specific problem I have since most pdfs are locked and don’t permit copying of text.

Note that version 5.1 of Acrobat Reader (and later versions, I assume) allows you to select text to be pasted elsewhere.

[chatdemon]

Zherog wrote:

Note that version 5.1 of Acrobat Reader (and later versions, I assume) allows you to select text to be pasted elsewhere.

Not if the PDF has copy/paste locked, which is an option in Acrobat full version when you create a PDF.

Locking such a basic feature is pretty bad PDF design, IMO, but I can understand publishers that do it to try and prevent people from reposting entire documents to the web in text or html format.

[Zherog]

Interesting - I've never run across that. But then, I rarely purchase a pdf; just about all of the ones I have are free downloads.

Sweet - I learned something new today! :)

[Gary Teter]

Just a quick note -- our PDF issues aren't locked; you can copy & paste text all you like. However, we are restricted as to which issues we can offer in PDF format. I believe Vic Wertz has described our limitations in another thread, but the primary restriction is that the issue has to be sold out (no back issues available), so it may be some time before the current issue is available in PDF format.

[Lord Storm]

Gary

I am curious about the "why" of the soldout requirement. I assume that is a company policy, which is what I am asking for a change in. I still wonder why the pdfs can't be made available to subscribers for free, I am a member of a professional organization and I can get both paper and/or pdfs of the monthly periodical.

BTW even if a pdf can have its text grabbed thats still not as easy as being given a word file, however beiong able to grab text would seem to be an acceptable compromise, IF the pdfs were available in a timely manner and were free to subscribers. I still think that micropayments for single text articles still makes sense.

mark

[Vic Wertz]

Lord Storm wrote:

I am curious about the "why" of the soldout requirement.

Because that's what our contract with Wizards of the Coast explicitly requires from us.

-Vic.
.