That's the thing I love about this community, you'll find someone from just about every walk of life.
Yeah, i was thinking about that as well... Have purchased a couple of books coming out of that, and at least "The foresight war" (though softcover) is of excellent quality (after two years including a few friends borrowing it, its still in very(!) good condition).
Didnt know you could get hardcover from it though.
The author of the Judaism chapter of RoP:D (Erik Dahl) was supposed to copy from Kabbalah, because he was stepping in at the last moment after the originally contracted author for that chapter flaked.
The authors of Kabbalah were not supposed to copy from a range of non-Atlas sources, and that's the problem.
Wow. Just - wow.
I have all the 5th Edition line except Calebais and the LARP book (so my opinion is probably not very useful). I will continue to buy the hard cover 1st editions as they come out. I prefer hard cover for anything that has re-use value but would be happy to buy soft-back stories (I never bought Calabais as we'd played it already in a previous version).
Surely, very few would not buy a book they wanted because it was only in soft-cover. However, like some others, I wonder whether adding 250 say to the initial print run would be better than doing a soft-cover reprint, though I appreciate that that is more up-front investment. I would have thought you would know the size of your loyal following and therefore how many of anything you are sure to sell within a few months of the publishing date.
I'm a very fussy RPG enthusiast.
I generally want the best version of a book out there - witness my purchase of Second Year of Our Reign by Greg Stolze in color hardcover from Lulu despite a semi-ridiculous price.
So, I'll be getting hardcovers as they come out. If a softcover comes out ala ToME, I'll grab that as well. If I missed a book, I'd likely scour shops and online stores to get the hardcover, though I appreciate the softcover's availability, and would buy a softcover reprint if for some reason I missed the hardcover and I needed that particular book for immediate use in a game.
Vrylakos
Ah that's the bit I didn't get. And while that was bad on those authors', I am selfishly happy that I got a copy before they stopped printing.
I'm perfectly happy with softcovers, especially if the price is even a little bit lower.
Please count me in the "First release in hardcover, second and following prints in softcover" category.
-K!
We try to set initial print runs at an appropriate level, which to my mind is a supply that lasts about 3-5 years. Sometimes we're wrong, and we find we've printed a 25-year or 100-year supply. Or we're wrong, and we printed a supply for 3-12 months.
Marginal offset printing costs are very low, which argues for printing larger quantities. On the other hand, warehouse space is tight, and I have pallets of 4th Edition books that we printed too many of, lured in by those low marginal print costs. Sooner or later some of those books will go to the recycling center, just to free up space, as we did with several pallets of 3rd Edition books of the WotC/White Wolf era back a decade or so ago. But I HATE doing that. (At least it was a little easier when it was books published by someone else, but still horrible thing for a bibliophile like me to have to do.)
It was OK to re-use Kabbalah material in ROP: Divine. The problem is that we did not know that some of the material in Kabbalah had been lifted verbatim from someone else's website. To be clear, the ROP: Divine authors are blameless -- they were reusing material that Atlas Games had purchased as work-for-hire in good faith...only the person(s) who sold it to us was selling us material that was not theirs. (And let me also be clear that not all the authors of Kabbalah are implicated, but it's not clear to me so long after the fact who it was that submitted the plagiarized material.)
My usual goal used to be that the initial shipments of a book to distributors would cover the fixed costs, and then the restocks over the coming months and years would go to company overhead and profit. These days, with the dwindling number of distributors and the stretched out sales pattern, it typically takes longer to hit the "fixed cost recovery" point. But then, we're also much stronger financially than we were in the late 90s - we are no longer so concerned about having enough receipts within 30 days to be able to pay a printing bill on time. (Thus we've been able to hang on to the same price tag on the ArM5 supplement hardcovers for years, despite inflation and declining first-month sales.)
In essence, that's what we're talking about -- digital printing that makes very short runs possible. I wouldn't go with the "one at a time" model (like Lulu/Lightning Source), but runs of maybe 100 copies at a time.
Edit: I should add, last I checked the hardcover options for print-on-demand are not the adhesive case like Atlas hardcovers, but more like a "cloth" hardcover. An example that we've actually done was the novel The Rough and the Smooth, by Robin Laws.
As someone who is quite 'hard' on rpg books, it rather depends on the style of soft-cover.
The old rolemaster books were terrible - the stapled ones ripped and fell apart; the glued ones just fell apart. Both were ok for adventures which didn't have lots of people flicking through to find the bits they wanted, but the rulebooks/companions just disintegrated.
The 4th edition AM soft-covers have survived surprisingly well, with just the covers starting to delaminate at the edges after several years' playing, so that standard would be fine.
Like most of the others, softcover is much preferable to only electronic. However, as a cheapskate, if I knew that there would be a cheaper version coming later, I'd wait. (Others in the group would buy it as hard-cover so I wouldn't miss out).
Gilarius
I, for one, would like to add my voice to the "I'd buy 'em if they didn't break in six months of normal use" crowd.
John, if you are ever about to pulp a bunch of "Sanctuary of Ice", please drop me an email. 8)
I don't blame you, such waste pains me to. Would it be worth the bother to advertise a "fire-sale" of these old materials? Some collectors might want a few copies.
For OOP titles, I'd like to see them made available through lulu.com or some other POD service. Then you can choose yourself whether you want a softcover or are willing to shell out for a hardcover (which I always am).
Cheers,
Patrick
And I should add that I have printed my own personal copies of a couple of OOP rulebooks using Lulu. They are hardbacks, not clothbacks, FWIW, John.
P
The costs savings (less than 10%?) is negligible. Even 28 vs a hardcover price increase to as much as, say, 35 is not that persuasive.
Unfortunately, hardcover is so much more attractive on so many levels - aesthetics, durability, style points.
I know I'm voting against a reprint in some cases, but I have to be honest.
(What about a massive pre-order campaign?)