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Go To Front Page Now. The Ebooks are Here

Hmmm. Adobe Reader 6.x keeps saying "need to be connected to the internet" when I try downloading Exalted. Checking my DRM settings again. ;_;

The free Gamma World d20 seems to be not free now. :(

Granted it's not June 7th yet. ;)

Casey
 
Originally posted by Ben W Bell:
Well I have bought quite a lot from RPGNow in the past. The main problem I can see with DriveThru is their prices are a little high (some of the PDFs are the same price as the actual book), and the DRM stuff may make it a pain. Now I don't condone sharing PDFs and I insist all my players buy their own if they want copies, but it is nice to be able to stick them on a CD and run them on any PC when I need to which is something that won't really work with the DRM.
Well, the prices appear to be set by the publisher - GOO is outrageous, WW mearly high and the GDW material is just right. As for cdrom, I've already saved my T2k purchase to hard disk, burned them to cdrom, deleted them from the disk, disconnected that pc from the internet and ran the pdf from the cdrom just fine. It's about as unobtrusive as DRM gets - kinda like what Apple uses for iTunes - and keeps the publishers happy. As for other pc's, I believe you simply have to authorize them via the Adobe website.

But I do dislike that they will not replace copies in case of disaster. Looks like I'll need to be sure to shove a copy of my ebook cdrs into my saftey deposit box.

William
 
Those drivethrurpg guys must have the slowest server this side the Missisippi. It really sucks.

I must say I vastly prefer rpgnow.
 
Give it a chance, it's only the first day it's been up! There's bound to be a lot of demand and interest (and teething problems) at the beginning, give it a week or two to calm down...

Jeez, people want things yesterday in this modern age! ;)
 
Originally posted by Cymew:
Those drivethrurpg guys must have the slowest server this side the Missisippi. It really sucks.

I must say I vastly prefer rpgnow.
Dang folks! They just opened up and are getting swamped! Give em a few days to iron out the kinks and get the demand distributed.

Hunter
 
Which is why I'm on to other things and waiting until Tuesday to work out DRM on my copy of Adobe Reader and give it another go.

The net's a fickle beast (Shub-Internet, Beast of a Thousand Processes, Eater of Characters, Avatar of Line Noise, and Imp of Call Waiting) even on a good day and weekends are bad*. Tech Support likes to be home on weekends just like everyone else. ^_^

Casey

* which is why I still think general release is Monday, June 7th
 
I think Monday was supposed to be the release date... apparently George Vasilakos (sp?) (he who runs Eden Studios) was a bit surprised to find that the store had already opened.
 
Originally posted by hunter:
Dang folks! They just opened up and are getting swamped! Give em a few days to iron out the kinks and get the demand distributed.
That's what they get for ordering those crappy Sun boxes instead of an IBM E-server...
file_23.gif


-MADDog

<Mainframes make the world go round... NO, REALLY - you think orbital dynamics just HAPPEN??>
 
Well have the procedure working and DRM isn't quite as bad as I thought. It's more hoops and ladders than regular PDFs and more than I like but not unbearably so. I'm not using pre-MacOS X or Linux on this compy, both of which can't use these files.

Having said that:

1) some of the non-GDW pricing is too high for me. When I can buy the original printed copy brand new from my FLGS for not much more than a pdf copy there's no choice in my mind. When a product is pdf-only (i.e. never printed) or very oop and hard to find I'm inclined to pay more.

GDW is very reasonably priced there considering, being significantly lower than original / adjusted price for OOP books, some of which are very hard to find. From what I can tell from some rpg.net threads the prices are largely set by the original publisher.

2) The main restriction I'm running into is the copy / paste limit. If QLI's products for example had such a limit I'd not buy most or any of the one's I've bought. I routinely paste UWP's, NPC stats, short writeups etc. into my game notes for comparisons, expansion, and the like. I can't do this as is with the DriveThruRPG.com files. Honestly I doubt such a copy / paste restriction* is going to prevent piracy one bit. Have emailed them about this restriction.

There's a minor concern about not being able to tweak a page or group of pages if the contrast etc. is off for my setup but so far the scans are better than the TSR ESDs so I've not had an unreadable page yet.

On the plus side the files are scanned in fairly well with good use of OCR though the copy restriction limits the usefullness of the file having OCR.

Casey

* corrected this with info from the faq file:
What can I do with my eBooks?

By default, we package our books with rights that allow you to print unlimited copies, copy 10 selections of text (or 10 pages if a selection spans multiple pages) to the clipboard every 10 days.
 
OK, maybe I should cut the guys some slack. A newly started service might be a bit slow. But I tell you, it does not look very professional to have a non-talkative server.

But, now I have also found out that they don't sell regular PDF stuff, but some kind of "activated content" which is just for Windows.

Just forget it. No way I'll shop at that place!

Activation, not being able to move my bought stuff, what's next? Get real...

I'm negative, strongly so.
 
Originally posted by Cymew:
OK, maybe I should cut the guys some slack.
<snip>
I'm negative, strongly so.
So I see. ^_^ The site's been fine for me today which is the first day it was supposed to be up and a Monday to boot. The free Exalted core book download is very nice even with the restrictions.

DRM isn't Windows only, it's any computer that can run Adobe Acrobat 6. Last time I checked MacOS X isn't Windows. :D Admittedly this cuts out people using Windows 95 on down, possibly PDAs, Linux, etc. . :(

It looks like you can easily backup the purchased files though I have not tried activating my account on another computer to view backed up files yet.

I suggest you check out the DTRPG faq
http://www.drivethrurpg.com/catalog/FAQ.htm

FWIW it looks like Malhavoc Press (i.e. Monte Cook's company) has already switched to DTRPG from RPGNow.com . Considering he more or less was the first to sell large numbers of products that come out first or only on pdf it looks like this is something to keep track of. I was surprised at the number of companies they have already. If the local FLGS hadn't had a huge used "End of WoD" sale recently I'd be already cherry picking the WW selection. mmmm Wraith goodness-

As always YMMV,
Casey

[EDIT]Looks like the DRM'd files may work on PDAs but I don't have a PDA worth running Acrobat on to test this out[/EDIT]
 
The DRM stuff for this is kicking up a massive fuss on the industry boards. I for one cannot get their PDFs working on more than the machine I download them on, which is a grave concern as I'm not intending to keep that machine forever.
 
The DTRPG faq says:

"You can have your eBooks on as many computers as you want, so long as each computer is activated with your DRM account."

But the Adobe faq states:

"For Adobe PDF eBooks, you can activate one PC or Mac and one PDA for each user."

It adds that you cannot deactivate a machine; this would imply that once you activate an ebook on one machine, you can only view it on that machine ... forever. Three years from now when that machine fries itself and is beyond repair, you no longer have access to the ebooks you purchased.

Of course, I could be misreading it, or it could be mistated. I haven't tried it out just yet.

For reference: http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/30f36.htm
 
Apparently the Abobe FAQ is wrong in the case of the security settings on these ebooks.

I got my copy working fine on another computer - I installed Acrobat 6 Reader on the other PC, copied the ebook to the hard drive, opened it with Acrobat 6, and then it took me through the activation steps again and that was that.

There is one file you have to download from Adobe to get it to activate, with an .EDN extension. It's possible that if you had another version of Acrobat already installed then that might try to open it.

To avoid this, go to Windows explorer, go to the Tools/Options menu, click the File Types tab. Find the EDN extension in that list, click the Change button there, then find the Adobe Acrobat 6.0 executable (you may need to Browse for it). After that, the EDN file should always be opened by Acrobat 6.
 
The Adobe FAQ has the basic restrictions but individual vendors can have different restrictions from what I can tell, which DTRPG has done, in this case fewer than the norm.

Casey
 
Since I absoultely refuse to give a 3rd party personal information when they are giving me nothing, this is yet another company I will not be doing business with.

I will also probably not be doing business with the companies that choose to use DRM.

Oh, well.
 
Nope. You don't need a .net password (there's a little link underneath the .net page that says "no thanks I'd rather use Adobe ID" or something. So you can use an Adobe ID.

As for "giving a third party information when they are giving you nothing"... you get the Ebook from DTRPG. You get the activation from Adobe - so I'd say that's giving you something right there.

Frankly, I've seen a lot of wild hysterical frothing from some people (especially on rpg.net) about this over the past few days that is not based on reality. And most of the "problems" that people claim exist are either them being lazy (I've seen a claim of it being a major hassle to install Acrobat and activate the PDF - it took me all of about 5 minutes) or can be gotten around simply by just printing out a copy of the darn thing.
 
Originally posted by Flynn:
DRM requires a .NET passport, which I'd rather not sign up for... *sigh*

Oh, well,
Flynn
No it doesn't as far as I know. You can sign up for an Adobe account and use that. Hell I didn't even sign up for either and am able to use the eBooks on my one computer here (I don't have a need to move them between machines).

Hunter
 
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