From my foxhole, nothing.  I'm buying more and more of my gaming books as PDFs these days.  I recently bought a fast 1200 dpi duplex-capable laser printer and a super-hvy-duty stapler, so if I want a printed book to hold in my hand, no sweat. 

Furthermore, I just got alerted to deploy to Iraq for a year.  My deployment bag must be no heavier than 70lbs.  Can I take my 5+ bookshelves of gaming books with me?  Nope.  But I CAN take a personal laptop with every PDF I've ever bought on the hardrive + CD backups.

Best of all possible worlds, of course, was the deal you offered on Defiance...buy the book, get free PDF, or buy the PDF, get book at discount.  Pretty book for shelf, portable PDF for laptop.

--Rich Spainhour

PDFs appear to be working for you, so do stick with it!

Seriously I am not that big a fan of hardcopy books, not everyone has that much room to store them. A PDF is easier reference too, I cant imagine how many times I needed to find out about say anti-fighter batteries, I just need to do a search and acrobat lists to me all instance where the term appear and the context. No more book flipping for me. I agree on the table-top, might be just a little awkward having a laptop or monitor nearby. But a printed quick-reference sheet or 2 handles most queries. Any tabletop game that requires me to have the whole book for me to check on stuff...well, either I am anal or its not the kind of rules I want to play with. I like to think I am not anal.

If I am to get a book then I must be frank; I have been spoilt by gorgeous full colour, professionally layout gamebooks with lots of nice iilustrations and photography for sometime now . Many folks will say I am shallow for emphasizing the fluff and the aesthetics over the rules themselves but that's my point; If I am only interested in the rules then a electronic no frills ebook is what I would prefer.

Cheers,

Ur of Persia

I generally won't buy pdf-only products.  I've made a few exceptions to that in the past, but my general take on it is that if the publisher isn't willing to risk printing hardcopies (which isn't much of a risk with today's POD and desktop technologies), then they must be so unsure of their product that I don't need to own it.

Real print runs are a sign of confidence, and very reassuring to this consumer, at least.

Rich

Arguably, yes, POD does fill the need for available hardcopy.  But I'm not sure that it allows you to put your product on the shelves of all those game stores out there, nor does it work well with the distribution net.

OTOH, perhaps the real question is whether MJ12 *needs* the distributor-retail system to sell their products.  Five years ago I would have said yes, you must get you stuff into stores to survive.  These days, between internet and word-of-mouth, maybe you don't...

Rich