PDF Subscription?

[Rhenthyl]

I'm loving the looks of the Adventure Path and Roleplaying Game Subscription, but while the cost of the books looks great, the postage is a killer (to the UK) do you offer a similar subscription but for the PDF's? If so where do i sign up?

If i've read the subscription right, it being a monthly thing, that means it's going to cost me around 74£ a month, which is way beyond my means sadly

[Papa-DRB]

This has been asked many times before, but they do not offer a PDF subscription. Vic Wertz has explained the reasoning HERE

-- david

[Rhenthyl]

Shame, perhaps they could look into setting up an EU distributer or POD in the EU. Frankly i'd love to subscribe but not at the cost of paying an arm and a leg to get the books.

[Vic Wertz]

Rhenthyl,

Back in the earliest days of Paizo, when we were publishing magazines, we tried a couple of different UK partners for fulfilling European subscriptions, and it was frankly a terrible experience for all parties involved. Handling things ourselves increased shipping costs, but also markedly increased customer satisfaction. (And while we regularly reevaluate POD options, I have not seen a POD book printer yet that prints to our quality standard.)

That said, with respect to the specific subscriptions you're asking about, the situation is significantly better than you estimate.

The Adventure Path subscription is monthly. Standard AP volumes are $24.99, though subscribers get a 30% discount off cover price, making them $17.49, and shipping to the UK is approximately $7.84 these days, for a total of $25.33 each month.

The RPG subscription isn't monthly—we typically publish about 3 hardcover books each year. The page count varies by book, so the book's price and weight-based shipping costs also vary. To give you a common example, though, the most recent release is Bestiary 5, which costs $44.99; alone, that book would ship to the UK for $25.19; that's a total of $70.18.

We do release our products at the same time each month, which means things will ship together to save money. So if you have both subs, that Bestiary would ship along with that month's Adventure Path volume for a shipping cost of $31.09. Better still, the Adventure Path subscription gets you the Pathfinder Advantage: 15% off of suggested retail price of almost all products on paizo.com, with the exception of non-Paizo downloadable files. That means the Bestiary itself would be discounted to $38.24, so the total for the Bestiary and the AP volume, including shipping, would be $86.82.

So assuming an exchange rate of $1=£0.72, when there's just an AP volume (which is most of the time), you'd pay about £18.26; the months there's also an RPG product, you'd pay about £62.60 (assuming the RPG book has a similar page count to Bestiary 5).

(Please note that shipping costs are calculated for individual addresses at the appropriate time, and may vary slightly from the numbers I provided.)

[Rhenthyl]

ahhhh now that makes a lot more sense! I was thinking it was monthly for all of them. You might want to consider adding a little extra info to them, such as whether they're monthly or not, also in the case of the RPG one, just say an average of once per quarter or something. Just so as peeps on this side of the pond don't have a coronary when we look at the price :D

Just a thought, but have you considered Kindle or iBooks for digital distribution? I know originally Kindle couldn't handle large files, but these days it easily handles 500mb+ files without a hitch.