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I would like to request an option for PDF only subscriptions. I do not want a physical book as I have no space for one and would prefer a tree be saved than turned into entertainment. Having lost the free PDF VO perk, I find I cannot even find a way to support you with subscriptions because there isn't an option to do so.
When I subscribed I used to media mail the books to a convention as a donation. So I was not only paying for the subscription but also paying to offload the physical books.
All I wanted was the PDFs.
I wish they would do electronic subscriptions. I've been after it for years. I'd pay the same as I did for the print subscriptions just to support Paizo and save myself space.
Community & Social Media Specialist
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Thank you for expressing a good option for you all here! Right now, our current website doesn't have a way to facilitate this, but options are being researched! If there is enough demand, that would help us as well, so I'll pass this onto the team!
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I would also love this option, especially since shipping and import costs to Europe sometimes cost more than the books themselves.
Thank you for expressing a good option for you all here! Right now, our current website doesn't have a way to facilitate this, but options are being researched! If there is enough demand, that would help us as well, so I'll pass this onto the team!
If there is a subscription available for physical product line, shouldn't all* that's theoretically involved in making a subscription available for digital ones be to have another such subscription option, at a different price point and which doesn't charge shipping? Then the same day that the PDFs are sent to subscribers of the physical line (and the special edition physical line), the same mechanism which is used to do that gets used to also send them to subscribers of the digital line?
I feel like the only technical reason that the site wouldn't be able to facilitate such a structure would be if for some reason a subscription can't be set to have no shipping charge, which would be a really puzzling (but theoretically possible) technical limitation since different items already have different shipping charges.
* plus adjusting page layouts / marketing to indicate their availability and allow them to be added to cart, of course, but there's certainly nothing on the technical side that would be blocking that.
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If there is a subscription available for physical product line, shouldn't all* that's theoretically involved in making a subscription available for digital ones be to have another such subscription option, at a different price point and which doesn't charge shipping?
Noting I am NOT an expert on online stores, inventory management, custom coding, or much of anything else involved in answering this question, and I have been out of the internal loop at Paizo for 7 years, I have run into weird limitations with what game company storefront can and can't do (purely as a layman exposed to this stuff secondhand in team meetings for various companies over 26 years).
I don't know if it is still true, but 7 years ago one of the issues Paizo faced was having their storefront, shipping program, warehouse maintenance program, royalty to 3pp program, blogs, and subscription management all be integrated. Selecting items for subscriptions and when they got sent out manually gets both really expensive in terms of labor-hours and has an annoyingly high error rate.
So you need subscriptions to track who has a thing coming, set up the order to send it, generate a shipping label, track when it was shipped, and add any pdfs going with it, remove the physical item from listed inventory totals, all automatically. I know what programs (or pieces of programs) you use for all this can have a huge impact on what the end integrated system can do.
From what I have been told over the years, if you had to start with a system designed exclusively for shipping physical goods, because it was what you could afford that did everything you needed for physical product--and you could add a system that added sending an email with pdfs for any appropriately tagged physical book order--that system might NOT be able to automatically send pdfs monthly without having physical books connected to them.
And changing that may not be fast or simple, especially after layoffs.
I would also appreciate this!
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I would love this option. Shipping to Europe is too expensive for me to consider getting a subscription on the books. I order all of my Special Edition books via a local small nerd store. If I have the option to obtain the PDFs on a subscription basis.. that'd be amazing.
Mind you. I will still buy all of the Special Editions. I have issues. :') The PDFs are just too good to have around while running APs and the like.
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Yep as a european, who is also on minimum wage, I have neither the money nor interest for physical books. it would literally bankrupt me.
not being able to just get a pdf subscription has always been one of hte most frustrating things for me with pf2e.
likewise, a FVTT sub.
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Physical books take up so much space. Collecting for over 30+ years, shelves are full.
I also want PDF-only and FVTT subscriptions.
It would also be nice if digital items were easier to browse in the store. Is there a reason that PDF and VTT aren't selection boxes on the main product page next to Hardcover, Pocket Edition, etc.?
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Another vote for digital subscriptions.
I had to cancel many of my subscriptions a few months ago because of the shipping fees (and the custom taxes). I kept only the AP subscription (mostly for the Paizo Legacy Advantage), but I would happily restart them all as a digital-only version.
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Director of Brand Strategy
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PDF subscriptions have been something people have been asking for since the days of Dungeon and Dragon, so pre-2007. I don't have the search fu to find the old post from co-owner Vic Wertz from years and years ago about why this wasn't feasible at the time or a viable option in the future, but that future was many years ago.
One of the things that subscriptions do for Paizo that a lot of customers might not consider is that it gives us a means of accurately predicting what portion of a printing is going to sell through immediately, which in turn allows us to set print runs at quantities that will meet our long-term sales needs but also not leave us with tons of stock for years on end that we can't sell. There was traditionally a fear that offering digital-only subscriptions would make our print runs smaller, and thus our per-unit cost of goods higher.
I'm not sure this is still the case, or that it ever was, but it is part of the inertia at play in making the transition toward digital subs. When there are very real potential consequences for a decision like this, it certainly makes the math of whether it's worth the resources to implement a lot more complicated.
Of course, the reality is that people who can't do physical subs for whatever reason and who might subscribe to a digital option, are generally cancelling their physical subs, and thus not subscribing to anything. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to test the cost/benefit of adding new digital-only sub infrastructure until we can accurately gauge whether that option cannibalizes our print subs to an extent that it's not feasible.
Anyway, that's a lot of words to say that this is a conversation and request that is now nearly 2 decades old, and for which there is still no simple answer. But as Maya said above, it's ongoing and we're constantly exploring options that we hope will work both for our customers and Paizo.
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PDF subscriptions have been something people have been asking for since the days of Dungeon and Dragon, so pre-2007. I don't have the search fu to find the old post from co-owner Vic Wertz from years and years ago about why this wasn't feasible at the time or a viable option in the future, but that future was many years ago.
One of the things that subscriptions do for Paizo that a lot of customers might not consider is that it gives us a means of accurately predicting what portion of a printing is going to sell through immediately, which in turn allows us to set print runs at quantities that will meet our long-term sales needs but also not leave us with tons of stock for years on end that we can't sell. There was traditionally a fear that offering digital-only subscriptions would make our print runs smaller, and thus our per-unit cost of goods higher.
I'm not sure this is still the case, or that it ever was, but it is part of the inertia at play in making the transition toward digital subs. When there are very real potential consequences for a decision like this, it certainly makes the math of whether it's worth the resources to implement a lot more complicated.
Of course, the reality is that people who can't do physical subs for whatever reason and who might subscribe to a digital option, are generally cancelling their physical subs, and thus not subscribing to anything. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to test the cost/benefit of adding new digital-only sub infrastructure until we can accurately gauge whether that option cannibalizes our print subs to an extent that it's not feasible.
Anyway, that's a lot of words to say that this is a conversation and request that is now nearly 2 decades old, and for which there is still no simple answer. But as Maya said above, it's ongoing and we're constantly exploring options that we hope will work both for our customers and Paizo.
Well you have the PFS and SFS scenario lines which are ONLY pdf so subscribing to physical copies isn’t possible.
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I patently cannot afford a new physical book, nor do I personally have the space for it so my group shares an account that has a subscription we all 3 pitch in for whenever a new book comes out. If there was a PDF option, even at 30 bucks a pop, I think all three of us could justify completely seperate subscriptions.
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While my little collector heart longs for physical products, a PDF option would be more practical. (I'm not out of space yet, he says, knowing that it won't be too long before that's not true) If I want the physical books, I could just get them. I don't know if I would go for it if it became an option, but I would at least strongly consider it.
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I personally like having physical copies of rulebooks and sourcebooks to use as references, but I’d love a pdf only sub for Adventures/Adventure Paths.
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For what it's worth, here's another vote of interest in PDF subs. I almost exclusively play online these days so I don't buy physical anything for myself and while I do *eventually* buy the PDFs I want, Paizo would get my money on a more consistent basis if I could just 'set it and forget it' with a PDF sub option or two :)
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Community & Social Media Specialist
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For what it's worth, here's another vote of interest in PDF subs. I almost exclusively play online these days so I don't buy physical anything for myself and while I do *eventually* buy the PDFs I want, Paizo would get my money on a more consistent basis if I could just 'set it and forget it' with a PDF sub option or two :)
I thought I wrote this and had no memory of it and was jump scared! Anyway, thank you for making your voice heard!
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I forget what I posted somewhat regularly (where my forum name comes from). When I see someone with my avatar posting in a thread I didn't think I had seen before, my first thought is "I hope I didn't say anything dumb."
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For what it's worth, here's another vote of interest in PDF subs. I almost exclusively play online these days so I don't buy physical anything for myself and while I do *eventually* buy the PDFs I want, Paizo would get my money on a more consistent basis if I could just 'set it and forget it' with a PDF sub option or two :)I thought I wrote this and had no memory of it and was jump scared! Anyway, thank you for making your voice heard!
Hah! I honestly didn't even think about that when I posted. Sorry for the jump scare; I'll use this alias in the future for threads like this one :)
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Community & Social Media Specialist
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Hah! I honestly didn't even think about that when I posted. Sorry for the jump scare; I'll use this alias in the future for threads like this one :)
Oh it's very ok!! I do not have like... sole domain over the image, and I think Landon uses it too lol But I appreciate you still!
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To be perfectly honest, I'd sign up for PDF only subscriptions in the lines I'm not currently already subscribed to even if there wasn't any discount or other subscriber advantage other than getting the product automatically, just for the convenience of being able to make sure I don't miss new stuff in the lines I'm interested in.
The Paizo store site as it stands is extremely user unfriendly when it comes to finding new PDF releases, and only marginally better when it comes to new releases.
Searching for physical books by release date makes no distinction between upcoming releases and currently available books until you open the individual product pages and see if the product can be ordered, and there's no link from the product page for the physical book to the PDF version. It makes finding the new releases for someone who doesn't live on the Paizo community pages a pain. I've sometimes missed stuff I'd buy for as much as a month because it's just that hard to figure out what's come out.
There used to be monthly posts with links to the upcoming products in the Announcements forum and I generally found the new stuff that way, but that's been stopped since the store downgrade.
I use the term downgrade from a user perspective - the behind the scenes system may well be better for Paizo's purposes, but as a customer I feel if I can't find stuff easily, it's not working well.
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Community & Social Media Specialist
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To be perfectly honest, I'd sign up for PDF only subscriptions in the lines I'm not currently already subscribed to even if there wasn't any discount or other subscriber advantage other than getting the product automatically, just for the convenience of being able to make sure I don't miss new stuff in the lines I'm interested in.
The Paizo store site as it stands is extremely user unfriendly when it comes to finding new PDF releases, and only marginally better when it comes to new releases.
Searching for physical books by release date makes no distinction between upcoming releases and currently available books until you open the individual product pages and see if the product can be ordered, and there's no link from the product page for the physical book to the PDF version. It makes finding the new releases for someone who doesn't live on the Paizo community pages a pain. I've sometimes missed stuff I'd buy for as much as a month because it's just that hard to figure out what's come out.
There used to be monthly posts with links to the upcoming products in the Announcements forum and I generally found the new stuff that way, but that's been stopped since the store downgrade.
I use the term downgrade from a user perspective - the behind the scenes system may well be better for Paizo's purposes, but as a customer I feel if I can't find stuff easily, it's not working well.
Really good feedback as we work to make the site better! Thank you, Paul Ryan!