I really enjoy 3PP products but I also enjoy print products. Unfortunately, a lot of 3rd party publishers cannot afford to produce print products.
Is it possible for a company to exist that collected the best 3PP products and printed them under a generic brand of "Third Party" and shared profits with the company(s) of origin.
This would have the added benefit of presenting material from multiple sources in a standard layout, allow for additional editing, and potentially add additional art. Also, all books could be printed to a standard size.
Books printed under the "Third Party" logo could provide add space for each contributing company and the contributing companies would get to have there products in print.
I'd love to see this happen, especially with the kind of professionalism where 3PP companies, would want to be solicited to have there products printed under the "Third Party" banner.
While what you suggest is a good idea in theory, in practice it's really not that expensive to set up a small print run. Pretty much anyone can do it, which means it's no real guarantee of quality to make it into such a collection.
Of course, there's a large gap between being able to afford a print run, and being able to afford to do it in large enough quantities that you can make a decent profit ;) However, POD services (such as those provided by DriveThruRPG and Amazon) can certainly get a printed book out at a price that's comparable to any other printed RPG books as well.
Back to using it as an indication of quality, though: Just having "a company" that does it isn't enough, it'd need to be an existing company that people already saw as a quality brand, that was willing to put their name on third-party products that made the cut.
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The fact that there is so much open gaming content out there, and no one has simply bundled up this stuff and sold it in print, should tell you something about the economics.
Jon Brazer Enterprises has a number of print products available for print right now.
Available at Paizo and your Local Game Store
Book of Beasts: Legendary Foes
Shadowsfall: Shadow Plane Player's Companion
Book of Beasts: Monsters of the Shadow Plane
Available at DriveThruRPG/RPGNow and d20PFSRD
Book of Beasts: Legendary Foes (DriveThruRPG/RPGNow) (d20PFSRD)
Book of Heroic Races: Half-Faerie Dragons (DriveThruRPG/RPGNow) (d20PFSRD)
Book of Heroic Races: Seedlings (DriveThruRPG/RPGNow) (d20PFSRD)
Shadowsfall: Temple of Orcus (DriveThruRPG/RPGNow) (d20PFSRD)
I really enjoy 3PP products but I also enjoy print products. Unfortunately, a lot of 3rd party publishers cannot afford to produce print products.
That statement is it really not true. With several different print on demand companies like createspace.com for example you can get a hundred and fifty page book printed in black and white letter size for roughly $2.65 a copy. you can also do a full color 32 page book letter size from create space for roughly four dollars a book. Any publisher who cannot afford that should not be in business.
I think Brinebeast meant, "at a loss." Clearly, anyone with enough time on their hands can produce a book, and anyone with some spare cash can afford to carry a real inventory.
Yet a lot of pdfs are too small to warrant a print run. and I am often annoyed to buy a .pdf of only 8 pages. More compilations would be good.
Compilations are the best and easiest way to get 3PP to publish printed material.
We are working with DriveThru to get our print products out. We were doing things in a format that didn't work with their print format actually so there is a lot of back end stuff we will have to do.
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Back when I played Exalted regularly, I use to download the PDF from drivethru, take it over to Staples and get them to print and spiral bound the PDF. It cost less than buying the print book and I will always have the PDF as a backup if anything happened to the print book.
To this day, I still wonder why people that want a print book don't do that more.
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Thank you for the insight everyone.
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You can find Rite Publishing print products HERE
