PDFed Up
Book piracy and D&D have always been inextricably interlinked. During the very first years of the game, it circulated as much by samizdat as by commercial sales. First generation players were as likely to learn from smudged multi-generation photocopies as from actual books published by Tactical Studies Rules. At conventions Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson were frequently confronted by the sour pleasure of being asked to autograph Xeroxed copies of their work.
Decades later, tabletop stands at the vanguard of electronic publishing and therefore of electronic piracy. After all this time it’s still not clear to what extent piracy is an unavoidable annoyance, an uninvited yet indispensable source of promotion, or a threat to the hobby’s very existence and/or my personal livelihood.
I wouldn’t want to stretch the analogy too far, but there are parallels between the debates on piracy and of drug legalization. In both cases debaters make policy arguments based on the imagined future behavior of large groups of consumers whose current habits we know too little about. It’s easy to stake out a position but harder to argue from a pool of actual facts. (Actual = non-anecdotal.)
* How many youthful file-swipers grow up to be bona fide paying customers?
* How many illicit downloads convert to legit book purchases?
* How many adult ones are also dropping as much as they can afford on legit purchases, and wouldn’t increase their budget if the files became significantly harder to obtain?
* In any given number of downloads, how many represent true lost sales from customers who would otherwise have bought that item on the primary market?
These all boil down to the same uber question: would a relaxed approach to piracy grow our market or slit our throats? Sure, you can pick a side and argue it, but the state of available evidence is such that you get to choose the set of suppositions most favorable to your ideological bent and then go around in circles with the folks staking out the opposite position. Ultimately it’s a math question, but we don’t have the numbers. Because our niche is very small, market research of any kind is extremely rare. Worthwhile studies on the effects of piracy are nonexistent.
Whatever the other benefits or demerits of WotC’s move out of PDF, we’ll get to make slightly better inferences about the effect of piracy on book sales as we watch its effects. If D&D sales go up, we’ll know that there is a large pool of people who would buy the books, if it weren’t for extremely convenient access to free copies in a high-quality searchable electronic format. If they don’t, we can conclude that the thousands of illicit PDF downloads were made by people who are either not in the potential customer pool at all, or are just as willing to settle for scans, and are for all practical purposes also not in the potential customer pool.
To complicate the matter further, the answers to these questions may not scale from small to large companies. File piracy may serve as a free viral marketing at one publisher tier and represent a fatal drain on margins at another. Analogies between sectors also merit skepticism: music, movies and RPG books are all consumed differently, and the answers for one type of intellectual property don’t necessarily track to the others.
Anyone who speaks with certitude about this is just making it up. Somebody’s got to be right. But whoever that is has arrived at his correct conclusion by guessing.