I was wondering if at any point there might open up a print on demand option for hardback copies of OOP books for ArM5.
That or newly revised editions. Like stuffing all the Realms books into one tome, or all the Houses of Hermes books into one.
That would very cool as well. Some of the OOP books are pushing around 100USD. John's idea would be a great idea to keep collectors happy yet atill allow newbies like myself a means of access to the great material I keep finding.
While it isn't print on demand, books are typically published as PDFs and available at Warehouse 23 1 year after they were published in print.
True enough. I'm just a bit past the curve in learning a new tech. I've used pdf's extensively for years. But when I need to flip back and forth to find things I just can't seem to get the knack of doing it in pdf.
I'm sure it's purely an enculturation thing, but my vision feels very narrowed, like I'm staring through a box when I use a pdf for more than reading and review.
On the other hand, it is great for looking something up when you only remember a key word or phrase.
If you have a tablet, reading it on the device isn't too dissimilar from a book. On a computer it's less good.
Atlas is currently in the process of putting old PDFs on DriveThruRPG (OGL books, at the moment). I suspect that Ars Magica books are on the to-do list. DTRPG supports POD, and I believe it is relatively easy to set up if you are working from modern files. So, it's not at all impossible that POD versions of older ArM5 books will become available in the not-too-distant future. Maybe even ArM4. Don't hold your breath for anything older than that, though.
However, these are not zero-effort things, so it may take a little while.
Depending on the PDF, you need quite a bit of processing power to deal with them. I prefer using a computer over a tablet with PDFs, though obviously a desktop isn't portable. Even the most recent tablets tend to choke on graphics-heavy PDFs. Thankfully, Ars Magica books aren't bad for that, but every PDF release should include a stripped down version for speed. Paizo does a good job of breaking their PDFs up by chapter for that purpose.
I've never had an issue with any of the Ars Magica books, even on a 1st generation iPad. I do convert them to iBooks format, though.
Quick aside - are you saying you post-process the Pdf to epub format, or do you mean you use ibook app to view them? If so, what tool do you use to covert them to epub?
Ahh, I use iBooks to view the PDFs. I thought there was some conversion going on, but not so.
It is our plan to reprint old out of print ArM5 books in softcover format for sale back into the distribution channel, but it's requiring a little more effort since the earliest ArM5 books were laid out in Quark and we use InDesign exclusively now.
So we're working on it!
Yay!
Good to hear. I'll still be trying to scoop up the hardcover ones I find for sure. But this will be good for anyone like myself just getting their feet wet.
I find that using muPDF instead of Adobe Reader (for Android tablets at least) helps with graphic-intensive PDF files a lot.