Have you considered granting users who buy hard copies of the book access to the PDFs as well?
I love the visceral feel of a book in my hands, so I'm an AP subscriber for the physical books.
However, I'm just starting Kingmaker, and I find that I want to print out the wanted posters and other handouts. Even though you've given me permission to do so, it means I have to scan the book, making sure I've got everything aligned correctly, then print it out on my color printer.
It would be far more convenient for me to have the PDF of the book so I can print just the pages I need. And as a subscriber, you have a history of which physical books I've purchased from you, so you'd know which PDFs to give me access to.
Just a thought -- it would make my life more convenient, and save me from the dangers of my backpack getting caught in the rain and destroying my collection and whatnot. I wouldn't even mind a nominal fee (an extra $1 per book or so) to pay for the network bandwidth and such.
Thanks!
My subscription hasn't started yet (my first issue will be The Wormwood Mutiny) so I've been ordering individual guides: Kingmaker 1&2, Carrion Crown 4, etc.
And those don't have PDFs associated with them.
Good to know I'll get PDFs for the new ones, but it would also be nice to get PDFs for older stuff, especially since that's eventually going to go out of print, and I'm trying to fill a bookshelf with the full collection. (Yes, my wife has declared me an official "addict", but I'm not the one running around every gaming night going, "Scarwall! Scarwall! Scarwall!").
|
Ah, I see. Well, as an AP subscriber you will now get 15% off the price of the PDFs. So it's a bit cheaper to get the PDFs now. The last couple of Christmases have also seen a further 10% discount offer, so that is a useful time to pick up back issues. No guarantee that it will happen this year of course.
The discount and the free PDF are the big draw of subscribing, so I doubt that Paizo will start giving free PDFs to everyone who buys print.
I've been doing much the same, collecting wise. I started subscribing with Council of Thieves and I've now managed to go back and get the whole line in both print and PDF. Yay for addictions! :)
Some of the older AP volumes are getting hard to find in print - keep an eye on EBay.
This has been asked before and it won't happen. Paizo wants subscribers (steady flow of cash) and the big incentive is the free PDFs.
I'd prefer a "buy the pdf and get a discount off the hardcopy" deal. I usually buy pdfs for most of the books until most of the errata has been handled so that I don't have to have a bunch of printed out pages tacked into the book.
Well, I honestly think Paizo is missing a revenue stream here:
- There's no way to subscribe to back issues, so subscription doesn't come into play.
- If I buy the hardcopy, and even with discounts the PDF is close to $10, then I'm going to scan and print the pages of the hardcopy I need. Takes extra time, and is a pain in the rear, but I'm not spending an extra $10 just for player handouts (or spell tables or what-have-you). So far I've just been taping over the portions of the page I don't want the players seeing, and just showing them the book. It's faster than scanning, and doesn't cost me ink.
- On the other hand, if I buy the hardcopy, and then Paizo lets me download the PDF for $2, I'll happily pay the $2 to save myself the 10-20 minutes it would take me to scan the pages in question myself, and printing the PDFs is a lot nicer than a taped-over page.
So Paizo could say, "If you buy the book 6 (or 12 or whatever) months after publication date, you can download the PDF for a small extra fee." The fee could scale based on book size: $2 for AP modules, up to $10 for core rulebooks.
But in short, I'm not going to pay another $10 for something I already have in hardcopy, but I'd happily pay $2 for it, and that's "free revenue" for Paizo, since the PDFs already exist, are already available for download, and aren't going to encourage people not to subscribe because they can build in a delay that's long enough that only people like me who are trying to catch up with back issues are affected.
Basically, your potential loss of revenue is the people who decide that because of the discounted PDFs, they'll cancel their subscriptions, wait a year, and pay the extra $2. Your potential gain is all the subscribers ordering back issues and adding PDFs to their orders.
I'm not in the field, so I have no market analysis, but my OPINION is that the extra PDF sales would result in revenue gain.
Just my $0.02.
Well, I honestly think Paizo is missing a revenue stream here:
- There's no way to subscribe to back issues, so subscription doesn't come into play.
Subscription doesn't come into play for the person purchasing back issues, but it does come into play for those who received those back issues via subscription.
Giving away a free PDF when purchasing a back issue is basically telling all of your subscribers:
Cancel your subscription; no need. You can get the free PDF whenever you decide to buy it.
Giving away a heavily discounted PDF to a non-subscriber is basically telling all of your subscribers:
Remember that 15% discount we give you for subscribing? Cancel your subscription and we'll make it 80% when you buy the paper version at the same time.
There may be some merit to the idea of allowing a subscriber to get a discount on back PDFs, but then Paizo already gives subscribers 15%, so how deep does it have to go?
If Paizo was going to do something like this, they should instead consider a "backwards in time" AP subscription. The idea being that you can subscribe to the current and future APs, but also subscribe to a separate "backwards in time" subscription line starting with the current AP and working backward through the previous APs.
If you have both subscriptions, you actually buy two APs every month (+ Free PDF) until your backwards subscription reaches the first AP. It meets Paizo's goal of steady revenue, gives incentive to people who want to complete a collection, and doesn't give away all the benefits usually reserved to loyal subscribers.
I'm not sure how one would do the marketing on a "backwards in time" subscription though. It's a very odd concept to attempt to distill into mainstream marketing speak.
I really like the "backwards in time" subscription idea, as it would be perfect for me.
I'm not sure I agree about the subscribers: If you subscribe to the PDF-only, with the 15% discount you're paying $11.90 an issue. If a non-subscriber wants to get hardcopy and PDF, that's still $21.99 plus shipping ($19.99 for the hardcopy plus my suggested $2 for the PDF). Thus, even with the heavily-discounted PDF, the non-subscriber is easily paying twice as much. So saying that they can skip the 15% discount and get over 80% if they 'just buy the hardcopy' is a bit specious, since the hardcopy is significantly more expensive than the PDF. Yes, they got the PDF for a lot less than you did, but they had to pay an extra $20-$25 for the privilege.
But Paizo is very good about reading their threads, so they'll at least see our suggestions, and they can decide what (if anything) to do about them.
It's just that we have a situation where:
(1) I am now a subscriber.
(2) I'd like to fill in the back issues, and I'm willing to pay full price for them, since there's no "subscriber discount" for back issues.
(3) I am not willing to pay another 50% or so to 'add on' the PDF.
They can either say, "Tough luck, cheapie!", or they can ask, "Would this be a reasonable business model?"
My suggestion is that they allow people who buy the hardcopy to get a heavily-discounted PDF. They can limit it to subscribers, which would satisfy most of the concerns expressed above. They can allow backwards subscriptions. It's just an idea that would allow me to get PDFs as well as hard copies, without feeling like I'm paying twice for the same product.
I don't know if it matters much, but there is a subscriber discount for back issues - you get 15% off both the PDFs and the hardcopies. You also can't subscribe to the PDF only (though I suspect I may have misunderstood that part of your post).
Irrespective of actual calculations, though - the principle is that the better they make the deal for latecomers, the less valuable it is to begin your subscription now. They never want anyone to postpone subscribing so they make sure it's always a super deal and that nobody ever finds themselves to have been better off if they had waited. That necessarily limits the deals they can offer to people who werent subscribed when an item was released.
Offering some discount from here on might also annoy those of us who were latecomers and who went back and bought PDFs of those issues we'd missed (based on the policy of 'no free PDFs for latecomers'). It wouldnt bother me, but I can imagine people crying foul over such a policy shift.
|
My suggestion is that they allow people who buy the hardcopy to get a heavily-discounted PDF. They can limit it to subscribers, which would satisfy most of the concerns expressed above. They can allow backwards subscriptions. It's just an idea that would allow me to get PDFs as well as hard copies, without feeling like I'm paying twice for the same product.
The other issue with this is the FLGS. Yes, subscriptions may be Paizo's bread and butter, but the FLGS still sells a lot of copies of Paizo books. The more they give away when you order online, the more you alienate the FLGS owners who already resent paizo for selling their own products directly to customers through their website (I know of 3 stores in new england that wouldn't stock pathfinder until it beat out D&D for this reason). And there have been long, drawn out discussions about shops being able to sell PDFs and getting PDFs for books you buy at FLGSs
I'm not sure I agree about the subscribers: If you subscribe to the PDF-only, with the 15% discount you're paying $11.90 an issue. If a non-subscriber wants to get hardcopy and PDF, that's still $21.99 plus shipping ($19.99 for the hardcopy plus my suggested $2 for the PDF). Thus, even with the heavily-discounted PDF, the non-subscriber is easily paying twice as much. So saying that they can skip the 15% discount and get over 80% if they 'just buy the hardcopy' is a bit specious, since the hardcopy is significantly more expensive than the PDF. Yes, they got the PDF for a lot less than you did, but they had to pay an extra $20-$25 for the privilege.
Your numbers aren't quite right. A subscriber buying an AP issue, whether current or past, pays $16.99 plus shipping; if its a current volume part of his subscription, he gets the PDF for free. There is no PDF-only subscription. A subscriber buying a PDF to an AP volume before they began their subscription would pay $11.89 for it.
So, in your proposed plan, you could combine the Pathfinder Advantage 15% discount with your $2 PDF and as a "back-issue subscriber" get the hardcover and PDF for $18.99 plus shipping -- less than the cost of the hardcover alone for nonsubscribers and only $2 more than what the charter subscriber paid when the issue was current. That severely degrades the benefits of a keeping a subscription current rather than going back and buying what you want when you want to run it at a later date, especially when you can get the books for $13.59 each with free shipping at Amazon.
And I have gone back and bought PDFs of APs before my subscription started; even though it was during one of Paizo's PDF sales, they were still more expensive than $2 each. Why would Paizo want to make long-time customers feel like chumps instead of feeling like they got in near the ground floor of something awesome?
Taken together, the last three posts explain the reasons behind our policy pretty well. (Thanks, folks!)
You know you've done a good job explaining your position when other people can take it on themselves to explain it correctly. Thanks for being so open!