Do You Want Fries With That?

Today we're announcing a new business deal regarding the sale of our electronic products. Starting today, our PDFs will be distributed exclusively through a site called DriveThruRPG.com. To regular buyers of our PDFs, the change isn't going to be very significant. None of our prices have changed. When a new product comes out, (and we will be releasing Children of the Rune on Thursday), our "buy now" link takes you to a new place. The PDFs at DriveThru require that you have the latest version of Adobe Reader, but it is free, as always.

The difference involves something called Digital Rights Management (DRM). When you download your first purchase, you'll be required to click on a few things to activate DRM in Adobe reader, and then you'll be able to read or print your electronic product like before. You can share copies of the book between your multiple computers. You won't be able to make copies of the file and email them to your friends, but I suspect the vast majority of you weren't doing that anyway. Everything you need to do to get things to work is all well explained on DriveThru's site. They've got a How To Guide and a nice FAQ as well as a troubleshooting guide. And very responsive customer service, if you try to contact them directly.

You might hear some negative things from some people about DRM. Some points are valid. It's not perfect. Mostly, though, I think people just don't like change. And I can understand that. However, if you talk to (or read a message board post by) someone who's actually used DriveThru, you'll usually find that they are happy customers and quite satisfied with the experience. I'm particularly pleased with what I hear about their customer service. I heard from one person who had a problem and sent DriveThru an email. Customer service got back in touch within 20 minutes and solved the problem. They even sent a follow-up email to make sure everything was working fine. I think you'll agree with me that when it comes to downloading material or any kind of software, good customer service is just about the most important thing you can ask for.

New Faces in PDF Publishing
The point not to overlook is that the DriveThruRPG site is full of PDF products from publishers who, up until now, were not publishing in electronic format. This is because of DRM. See, DRM makes it much harder for pirates to distribute copies illegally (not impossible, of course -- nothing's perfect, particularly when it comes to computer security). Whether you realize it or not, this has been the main reason the vast majority of roleplaying publishers haven't been creating downloadable electronic products. Rightly or wrongly (I seriously have no desire to debate the truths of it), they have believed that piracy would hurt them.

Some of you who've been coming to this site remember that three years ago (almost to the day) I was the guy saying that PDFs were the next best thing. This was before just about anyone was selling roleplaying products in this format. Other industry professionals laughed at me. Since then, there have been a lot of big steps that have really made electronic publishing the next big thing. DriveThruRPG may be the biggest step yet.

This isn't just another place online that sells PDFs. If you go there, you'll see big-name publishers like White Wolf, Fantasy Flight, AEG, Chaosium, and a lot more. I happen to know that you'll see even more in coming months, and that the existing publishers will continue to add more titles. You can look at their list of publishers and read it like a list of forward-thinkers in the industry. These publishers are not only offering their old, out-of-print stuff, but new books as well.

It suddenly seems as though we may not be so far from the day when all publishers make their products available in both electronic and print format. That's exciting to me, particularly when I think about all the emails I get every week from people who quite literally would never have had the option to buy Malhavoc products if they were only print books. It's easy for me to forget that not everyone has a game store down the street, and that overseas shipping makes ordering books through the mail extremely costly -- if possible at all.

And speaking of out-of-print stuff, I was particularly stoked to see that companies like GDW and Fantasy Games Unlimited made their books available to DriveThruRPG. This older stuff contains some real gems that you'd otherwise never see except through electronic publishing.

This is a big deal for the game industry. I'm thrilled to be a part of it.

Free Stuff!
So I encourage you to go to DriveThruRPG.com and check it out. Look around. I think it's got a pretty good interface. There are hundreds of products there. You can even try it out by getting a freebie like our exclusive Narrog the Earth Serpent (downloadable from DriveThru's front page). Written by Mike Mearls, Narrog is the very first fully detailed dragon for Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed. Fans of Arcana Unearthed and the Diamond Throne know that dragons are rare and quite a big deal in the setting, so this is pretty cool. It's just a short little PDF, but it's free. There are other free products there too, like Exalted, and in the coming months there will be a different free electronic product there every week. Including another one from us: During the week of June 28, readers are invited to download The Book of Eldritch Might for free.

When you create your account, go to the product page for each product you own and make sure to check the box that says you want to be notified about updates to this product. That way, if we ever have to make a correction to the PDF we can tell you about it.

Oh, and the site has a reviews section, where customers can rate and review products they purchase. We've worked it out so that, for one week, you can go there and rate and review products you already have (you don't have to buy them or have bought them from DriveThru), just so you more experienced PDF buyers can let new customers know what's good. The launch of DriveThru is going to introduce people who might never have thought of buying electronic products to PDFs, so it would be helpful to them (and us) if you took the time to write some reviews. But only if you say something nice, of course... (Yes, that's a joke.)

And make sure you click on the speaker on the drive-thru menu on the front page. Multiple times. But don't do it with the sound on your computer turned up high while you're at work, unless you want funny looks from your coworkers.

As a publisher, I'm very impressed with the professionalism of the people behind DriveThru and the real sincere effort they're making to ensure that a lot more, high-quality electronic products are available to you than ever before.

Like I said, this is a big deal. And really cool.