How much would it slow domestic shipping? Because if it's significant, I think it put some (many?) US customers into the same boat as international customers like me.
The USPS claims 2-8 days. If that's accurate, it means a substantial improvement since I last used media mail (when I was reselling textbooks in college, media mail was 3-30 days, IIRC).
But that improvement seems to come with stricter limits on what can be sent: it now specifically says 'intended for education materials' and bars video games.
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You just qualified for the Ayn Rand Award of the Week. Congratulations!Adding my opinion to the ecological comments. I have zero, and I mean zero, interest in paying more "for the environment."We are fast approaching the point where we won't need to pay more for ecologically sustainable print. Within 10 years producing virgin, acid-washed paper will be as or more expensive as producing acid-free with high post-consumer content. There will be no reason other than "I hate old-growth trees and like acid run-off" to not use better paper. Even today the cost difference is very small, but existent.Great! When we reach the point where printing Pathfinder on whatever paper is the most environmentally friendly adds nothing to the price I'm currently paying, I'll be all for it. Until then, I'm still unwilling to pay extra just so I can feel like a more gooder about my environmental citizenship.
-Skeld
I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I was operating under the silly notion that all opinions were valid, especially opinions about product costing. That's ok though, I said that knowing full well I'd take some lumps for it.
If you believe that "all opinions are valid", but apparantly you exclude the ones that don't find your position salutary. You're unhappy that Paizo makes a choice that's friendly to the planet because it might cost you a trivial amount of shekels. So I take it that opinions that criticise your stance aren't valid.
You're upset because Paizo did something environmentally friendly and you might have paid a bit more to absorb that cost. You must have been thrilled when Union Carbide trimmed some costs on their products by piling thier waste in Bound Brook, NJ waiting for Hurricane Floyd to disburse through the area when Hurricane Floyd rammed through the state.
You must have danced for joy with all the savings that were realised when a chemical plant was relocated to India saving it's customers money on all those safety and environmental measures. Wasn't your problem when that plant blew up a few years later and killed a thousand people amd maybe created a cancer spike a decade or so down the road. If my opinion of your post is that it's the writings of a selfish, inconsiderate perspective, you only have your text to blame.
Fact of the matter is.... it always costs more to to do the right thing, to eat the right food, recycle your plastic, etc. Do you think that people and companies have done shortcuts merely for the heck of it? It takes either a volountary decision to absorb the costs of doing things right, or mandatory regulation to make it so for the good of the community at large. Otherwise you get more Union Carbides dumping cans of wastes in more open lots in more Bound Brooks.
Wow, that's... amazing that you can take a handful of snarky comments from someone you don't know saying they don't want to pay more for recycled paper and turn it into a half-page worth of character attacks and accusations of being a corporate eco-terrorist. That takes skill.
I mean saying you disagree, telling someone you think they're selfish, telling them they';re flat out wrong, I can understand all that. But to then go on to claim how the deaths of a thousand people make them dance with joy, that's just taking it to the next level.
-Skeld
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Welcome to the Internet.
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How much would it slow domestic shipping? Because if it's significant, I think it put some (many?) US customers into the same boat as international customers like me.
As a couple anecdotal data points, I just mailed a book using USPS Media Mail from Alabama to California on 2/21 with a 2/28 estimated delivery date.
A couple weeks ago, I mailed another book (USPS Media Mail) to Washington state on 2/14 and it arrived 2/19.
My subs from Paizo usually arrive at my house 8 calendar days after I get my shipping notice, but I'm unsure how long they actually spend in transit.
-Skeld
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Wow, that's... amazing that you can take a handful of snarky comments from someone you don't know saying they don't want to pay more for recycled paper and turn it into a half-page worth of character attacks and accusations of being a corporate eco-terrorist. That takes skill.
I mean saying you disagree, telling someone you think they're selfish, telling them they';re flat out wrong, I can understand all that. But to then go on to claim how the deaths of a thousand people make them dance with joy, that's just taking it to the next level.
-Skeld
Well maybe if you had approached the problem with an attitude of something less extreme of being personally injured because Paizo spent an extra nickel on being environmentally conscious and you feel aggreived because of it, I would not have made that extreme a response.
The problem I see however with our whole screwed up society, is that it's becoming very apparant to me that on a social level most of us who don't live in caves ARE aware of the damage we do to ourselves and our environment and are choosing a path of deliberate ignorance becaise we're not willing to accept the price of the alternative.
There is a difference between "woe-is-me, all the environmental stuff is stealing my extra nickels" and "I'm not interested in paying extra for increased environmental friendliness" (not to mention following that up with "when paper prices reach parity, I'll be on-board").
The first is rife with personal injury. The second is what I actually said. By your own admission, your response was extreme.
-Skeld
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Third, your "discount" isn't really a discount because of pricing. I know that ~2/5 of a product's cost is for the developers, 1/5 is for the shipping, and 2/5 is for the stores. That's a generally, smart pricing philosophy and I know you guys are smart cookies. Since you're the store AND the developers you're getting 4/5 of the price. If I buy from my local guys/gals, I'm supporting a local place AND most brick and mortar will give me a discount as a loyal customer without shipping.
I'm not going to address your other points than to say that a) no one disputes that you could save money on shipping via your local FLGS, and I won't address at all the subject of pirating PDFs other than to reinforce that it's illegal.
That out of the way, yes, you're correct that the way the pricing works, if you're buying directly from Paizo, they're likely grossing 80% of the cover price. Roughly a third of that (assuming my numbers haven't changed) is their cost... it's not all profit.
More importantly though, and more directly than James said... your ability to buy Paizo product at your local FLGS hinges heavily on these subscription sales. In effect, subscription sales of Adventure Paths subsidize all of Paizo's products. That extra profit isn't just going to a pile of money that Lisa and Jacob swim around in (at least, I don't think so)... it's helping offset the costs of doing business.
I do wish there was a better way to address the concerns of the overseas folks.
I will add this, based on my experience of selling older game books at cons and Ebay, you COULD subscribe, and then turn around and sell the AP books. You won't break even that way, but you can lower your costs.
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- Without a PDF subscription, people who only buy PDFs come to our site once a month after they hear that the new volume is shipping (which we always mention in our weekly newsletter, so if they check that regularly, they won't miss it). They add the PDF to their cart and check out, and download the PDF.
- With a PDF subscription, the process would be very similar—we'd send you an email that it was released, but you'd still have to come to the site and download it. Ok, you'd be making a few less clicks because you can skip the checkout process, but realistically, we're talking about pretty much the same amount of time and effort invested on the customer end.
While we're at it, I'd love to just have my subscription PDFs show up in my mail, or direct links that didn't require extra clicks, or pie in the sky, just show up in my Dropbox/Sky Drive/Google Drive...
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Hey, could you maybe set it up so that all PDFs in the store are automatically beamed onto my harddrive, organized into folders exactly how I want them, despite me not being a subscriber to anything? For free, of course.
:)
My wife gets this. The downside is that she has be married to me to enjoy the Pathfinder premium service :)
Chief Technical Officer
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One good thing paizo does is using book rate (media mail) with domestic shipping which is a shared service (ie, ups, FedEx, dhl, and USPS) that's takes advantage of "available" space on cross country delivery and therefore limits additional carbon costs because the trucks carrying the products run regardless of capacity. Then the product is delivered in the "last mile" by the originating shipping partner (in this case USPS).
It has already been pointed out that Media Mail is a different thing, and that we don't use it, but I would like to clarify that we *do* use a "last mile" shipping service (UPS Mail Innovations) for qualified shipments whenever it's less expensive to do so. We do it more because it saves you money than because it's good for the environment, but that last thing doesn't exactly suck.
Ironically, I think the original post wasn't about the environment from what I could tell, but about the cost of shipping internationally.
When shipping can be as much as the product, I think understandably, the desire for a PDF only subscription can be seen as a better alternative.
I don't think anyone actually addressed that specific concern. There were things about the price and risk, but nothing that really addresses the pain of international shipping which was originally asked.
I'm not certain media mail would be the solution for international customers either.
I have friends in China, and friends in Ireland, and I don't think either one of them get physical products from PAIZO. I think one in Ireland gets PDFs occasionally, but never a physical product specifically due to the shipping and other costs, so I can understand the reluctance on their behalf.
Luckily I don't suffer from such problems, but I can see where they may be coming from.
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As long as LGSs (who foam at mouth at mention of words 'digital' and 'subscription' as it means cutting their sales even more) form a major component of expanding the hobby AND as long as "digital only" people are overshadowed by "I check my e-mails once per month, what do I use to open those ZIP files anyway?" people, things aren't likely to change.
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You could ship the physical product to somebody who *does* want them, and keep the digital copy for yourself. There are folks that can't subscribe (because they don't have a credit card) and might recompense you through PayPal. A bit more complicated, but makes multiple people happy.
We have no plans to offer PDF-only subscriptions.
The main benefit to customers of a PDF subscription vs. individual PDF sales is that a subscription would be more convenient for them. But let's examine the reality of that:
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However, if the answer is yes, then offering PDF-only subscriptions could cause irreparable harm to our business.So we have to look at risk vs. reward. The reward for our customers is the ability to get a copy of the PDF about a week earlier than they can right now, and the reward for us is probably not going to be dramatically high. The risk, however, is damaging, or even potentially *crippling* our main business. That's not a risk worth taking.
I have no idea if any others are still responding to this thread (from 9 years ago!) but I just saw it and I thought I would throw out a remark about new realities that weren't as much in play in 2011, but that certainly are now.
First off, however, I tip my hat to @Vic Wertz for his straight up answer to the question, which acknowledges realities that those of us who aren't running a business can't immediately appreciate. Another way of stating the hard truth is: My bottom line doesn't care about your 'feelings'.
Beyond offering that praise, I do have a comment to add. I will confess to not having read any more of this thread than this small section where Mr. Wertz, justifiably, presents the business case for not offering a PDF-only subscription plan. So, it's possible that my comment has already been made by others.
It's now 2020, and many, many, of us have been forced to adapt to new realities, the likes of which we could not have imagined from our cozy world-view of the previous decade.
In my own case, in 2011 my gaming group was (and, I guess, still is) comprised of workplace friends. In 2014, that workplace, sadly, ceased to exist and the resulting gaming-group-diaspora has flung our members to far distant lands (Utah, Colorado, etc.), remote and inaccessible :-)
Needless to say, this had little effect on our gaming urges, and it wasn't long before we solved that minor inconvenience and began to play our games entirely within cyber-space on Al Gore's Information Super-Highway (don't jump on me, I'm just kidding... he never claimed to have 'invented' the Internet).
Anyway, the result is that many of us run our games entirely online. We ONLY have use for the digital version of things like rule books, maps, and tokens.
Having said that, I, personally, still prefer to possess physical copies of things like core rulebooks, and the like. However, and this is the point of this post, I have ZERO use for a physical copy of a combat map.
And that's why I'm making this post. I have to believe that, in current-year, we might want to find a way to make certain kinds of PDF-only subscriptions available. If there was a category of content for which PDF-only subscriptions could make sense, there might be a demand for it that would offset the possible loss in the print side of things.
Just sayin'.
Keep up the great work. Your material has always been of very high quality, and back when Wizards couldn't figure out who they were, I, for one, grew very fond of Pathfinder and recognized the value of Edition 3.5... Thank you.
- s.west
p.s. As soon as my group finishes this, very-long-running campaign in which we're engaged, I look forward to getting to know PFRPG 2nd Ed.
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Since this has already been necro-posted in the last few days, let me add my name to the list of people who would prefer a PDF-only subscription option, particularly for the books. I understand Vic's response above, and if the realities of the business prevent this from ever happening, then so be it. I'll continue to subscribe to the lines I want, and find something to do with the print versions. But if, at some point in the future, a PDF-only subscription becomes a possibility, know that there are many people that would take advantage of it.
Wow, this really got necro'd, lol. It's an interesting conversation worth bringing up again though, though perhaps only for some lines. I agree with Skeld, that I bet Vic's post is still accurate.
What I wonder is if this is a worthwhile option for just the flip-mats, for example. Sure, it doesn't make sense for the core and AP lines, but the flip-mats? Heck yes, I agree that in my gaming experience I have no use for the physical versions.
Though at that point we're just starting a 22nd thread on wanting awesome maps for modern VTT usage, lol.