Proposta de valor

Você mencionou o DDI:

Even better is the WotC approach with the DDI, you can look up any monster or item or (almost any) rule, in the most recent form, for 3 years at the cost of seven books. I think this is the way to go, even considering the horribly slow character builder.

É verdade, por três anos é um bom negócio. Mas e por seis anos?

Ainda estou usando o meu PHB 3.5, dez anos depois que o recebi. Eu tenho um conjunto de livros 3.5 que não chega nem perto da quantidade total que eles lançaram, e eu estou bem com isso porque eu não me importo com muitos dos livros que eles lançam.

Se o DDI existisse para o 3.5, teria me custado mais do que paguei pelos livros e não menos. Sendo um custo inicial, os livros não custam mais se você os usar por mais tempo. Assinaturas sim.

E, claro, os serviços online desaparecem todos os dias. O DDI para 4e ainda estará presente nos anos 10? Se você quer jogar e ele desaparece, para onde foram suas regras? Eu possuo um livro dos 1800s, por isso estou bastante confiante de que a Wizards não pode retirar meus livros em papel do 3.5, caso eles decidam que é hora de seguir em frente e não pagar mais por servidores (ou sair do negócio).

Inverter e compartilhar páginas

Tenho marcadores no meu PHB & DMG. Também sei onde estão algumas coisas, porque tive que usá-las tantas vezes. Eu posso abrir o livro e estar nas regras de luta em dois segundos. Não importa o quanto tente, não consigo chegar tão rápido no meu iPad. Também não posso ter as regras de agarrar E minhas anotações de encontro abertas ao mesmo tempo com a versão eletrônica, pois meu iPad só pode mostrar uma coisa de cada vez. Com os livros, posso colocá-los um ao lado do outro. Também posso adicionar uma descrição de feitiço no Compêndio de Feitiços. A área ao meu redor quando eu DM tende a parecer um livro forte.

É fácil compartilhar o livro. Posso entregar a alguém meu PHB para que eles possam procurar uma descrição do feitiço e continuar fazendo o que eu estava fazendo com meus outros livros e anotações no iPad. Se eu tiver que entregar meu iPad, perdi o acesso a tudo até recuperá-lo.

Material subjetivo

Há um lado subjetivo nisso também. Eu gosto de como os livros são. Acho-os mais fáceis aos meus olhos do que os e-books. Eles trabalham na casa de campo, mesmo sem energia.

No final, é realmente sobre quais trocas você prefere fazer.

Os benefícios de possuir um livro são as mesmas razões pelas quais ainda tem livros e por que as pessoas ainda comprar livros em vez de um Kindle ou PDFs.

A vantagem dos livros se resume a algo básico: interagir com eles é diferente para interagir com e-readers e, de várias maneiras, melhor.

Vamos considerar o caso de um único usuário, com acesso a um único e-reader ou a vários livros.

Um conceito-chave: os livros são ferramentas transparentes para leitura. E-leitores não são.

Uma grande diferença entre livros e e-readers é o conceito de uma ferramenta transparente. Uma ferramenta transparente é aquela que você pode usar sem ter que pensar conscientemente em operar a ferramenta para usá-la, porque fica fora do seu caminho quando você a usa - é algo que você pode esquecer que está usando.

Uma comparação fácil para demonstrar a diferença é entre uma caneta, que é uma ferramenta transparente, e um teclado, que não é.

Quando você pega uma caneta para escrever, não pensa conscientemente nas ações individuais de mover a caneta para cima, para baixo, para a esquerda, do outro lado, etc. Você pode simplesmente escrever, e seus movimentos são transferidos sem esforço pela caneta para o papel. Por outro lado, para usar um teclado para escrever, você precisa operar conscientemente as teclas do teclado, buscando conscientemente as teclas certas para produzir os resultados desejados. Usuários avançados ficarão mais à vontade com o teclado, mas nunca será uma ferramenta tão transparente quanto uma caneta, o que exige pouca operação consciente além dos movimentos naturais.

Livros e leitores eletrônicos compartilham uma situação análoga: o leitor eletrônico é menos transparente que um livro, embora a aptidão técnica e o uso da ferramenta possam ajudar. Os leitores eletrônicos estão recebendo melhor por serem ferramentas transparentes, mas ainda não estão lá.

Obviamente, isso deixa de lado a dificuldade de realmente escrevendo bem e de forma legível, mas ao considerar a transparência da ferramenta, a aparência organizada de sua escrita ou a rapidez com que você escreve não são um problema: se a ferramenta que você está operando fica fora do seu caminho é o problema.

O que isso significa para os livros?

Em geral, os livros fazem o que fazem excepcionalmente bem e o fazem de maneira transparente.

Os leitores eletrônicos podem permitir que você faça coisas semelhantes às que você pode fazer com um livro, mas seus equivalentes são limitados. A ação equivalente do e-reader pode não ser tão simples e fácil quanto executar a mesma ação com um livro, e você, a pessoa que está tentando ler o livro, pode ter restrições quanto à maneira de executar essa ação, de modo que não pode fazê-lo. de uma maneira que melhor combina com você.

• Ao colocar marcadores em livros, você pode usar o método que funciona bem para você ou que vem naturalmente para você. Você pode colocar guias coloridas (ou nomeadas) nelas, bater as páginas com um cão, etc. Há uma dúzia de maneiras de marcar páginas. Apesar de ser algo pequeno, este é um dos principal diferenças, já que, para alguns, o recurso de marcador equivalente do leitor eletrônico simplesmente não funciona, assim como métodos como guias coloridas saindo das páginas.
• Virar para esses marcadores é completamente natural e sem esforço açao. Você coloca o dedo ao lado do marcador e abre o livro.
• Navegar em um livro é fácil, rápido e flexível.
  • Você pode pular quantidades variáveis ​​de páginas por vez.
  • Para um livro que você está acostumado, pular para uma seção inteira pode ser tão fácil quanto virar para um marcador. Os leitores eletrônicos oferecem algo semelhante (se eles tiverem um índice), mas não é equivalente: você não pode pular facilmente para o meio de uma seção, ou assim por diante. A memória muscular desempenha aqui um papel útil que não pode ser desempenhado por um leitor eletrônico.
  • Os manuais de RPG costumam marcar a borda das páginas, para que você possa ver as diferentes seções enquanto o livro ainda está fechado. Isso orienta o salto entre as seções, e os leitores eletrônicos geralmente ainda não oferecem um equivalente.
  • Você pode facilmente folhear as páginas, mantendo os dedos nos anteriores para ir e voltar.
• Você pode abrir vários livros ao mesmo tempo e ter todos os visíveis em paralelo, com pouca perda de capacidade de ler ou operar qualquer livro individual, dado que você simplesmente tem espaço suficiente para organizá-los ou apoiá-los.
• Você pode passar um livro para um amigo na mesa, sem perder a capacidade de ler seus outros livros. (Isto é imensamente relevante para jogos como D&D, onde o mestre pode ter seu livro aberto e cada um dos jogadores pode ter um livro aberto com conteúdo pertinente a eles. Os casos podem ser iguais quando todos na mesa têm um e-reader, embora não tenha certeza de que isso seja comum.)
• Você pode marcar livros: faça anotações, escreva, desenhe, destaque e assim por diante. Você também pode deixar post-its e outras coisas neles. Você pode fazer coisas semelhantes nos leitores eletrônicos, mas eles oferecem opções muito mais limitadas, dependendo do leitor eletrônico.
• Os livros não ficam sem pilhas ou precisam de um cabo.

... e muito mais.

Si pode faça muitas dessas coisas com o e-reader certo, e os e-readers estão cada vez melhores em tornar essas coisas mais fáceis de fazer. Mas os leitores eletrônicos não permitem todos deles, nem fazê-lo tão facilmente.

Além disso, os livros podem ser melhores por outras razões.

In alguns casos, a versão eletrônica pode ser desaparecido conteúdo.

• No D&D 4e, o Compêndio não oferece conhecimento algum. O compêndio não lhe dirá quase nada sobre como surgiu o Caos Elemental e o Mar Astral, como o mundo foi formado, a Guerra do Amanhecer que foi travada e os estados atuais dos aviões.

• D&D 3.5e SRD contém muito pouca tradição, alguns nomes são diferentes e várias partes dos livros simplesmente não são divulgadas.

There's also the fact that some people just prefer books. The emotional factor isn't without relevance: to some such as myself, there's something pleasant about being able to pick up a hefty tome.

E-Readers offer little in comparison.

E-readers can give you one device instead of several heavy books, and offer some features that books don't - you can't ctrl+F a book - but it comes with trade-offs in ease of use in virtually every department.

E-readers are just... not yet as easy to interact with as books are.

In a short acronym: DRM.

It can be present in either the ebook or the reader or both. Paper copies have none. For example Amazon's Kindle is riddled with it thanks to Amazon's strategy levando a the removal of 1984 or remotely wiping a kindle. This is, of course, picking on one company which might not reflect the market as a whole.

Contudo, DRM takes your rights and freedom away. If DRM is so great, why won't anyone warn you when you're buying it? Note that circumventing DRM is illegal so any company that publish such ebooks (regardless of reader) force you to obey by the DRM.

Of course, you can get ebooks and devices that are DRM-free (for example Posthuman Studio's Eclipse Phase) but they are few and far between.

Is this an issue for the vast majority of RPG PDFs? I have no idea and would like some numbers if anyone can provide such.

I buy paper books because:

• I can lend the latest player in my group a paper book far easier than I can something on my Kindle.
• At game time, players on the table can browse different physical books, if they are all on my kindle then we can only look at one at a time.
• Somewhat related to the above, i find it easier to cross reference physical books than I do PDFs
• They look nice on the shelf.

I own an ebook, and I find it more comfortable linear reading than in physical books. Also, it's very handy when looking for exact words.

But I find flipping the pages looking for something that is not bookmarked or you don't know exactly where it is, (and you don't know what words look for) or doing diagonal reading on several pages much easier in physical books.

One thing that it's not very important to me, but it is to a lot of people is the aesthetic and emotional factors. A good physical book is something pretty that you can have and manipulate on your hands and that looks well on your bookshelf. Also, in time you can be emotionally attached to your manuals (especially if you own only a handful), but is rarer to feel the same to a digital file.

Still, it's probable that if you have a good and fast ebook reader, the advantages of digital formats are more than the disadvantages, but answering your question, these are the benefits of physical books that come to my mind.

Mesmo se right now at the gaming table, it does not seem to matter, books manage what technical devices can not: books can store memories.

I have roleplaying books on my shelf that have stains on and in them from funny adventures maneira back in time. I can open that book, look at the wax, coke and crisps stains and remember that one night when we finally slew the lich right before dawn... and the day after that when I flunked the test in school because I could barely keep my eyes open. The stain on page two is from that night.

If all my books in that shelf would reside on a single USB stick, the memories would still be there, but I wouldn't have anything to trigger them. That stick is sterile information. Nobody left a mark on it, no memories are stored on it. It's just information on a stick. Unchanged from when I bought it.

Apart from that, think about the way, the information would have to travel from a technical point of view: I still own that book. It survided a few moves without problems. I can still read it without problems. I have not a single computer document or game from that time. Not because our hardware would not be capable. I could probably store all that information in my phones ringtone memory today. But that was 1990. The computer I had was an Atari ST. That's 4 whole operating systems (counting all the Windows Versions as a single one) between that computer and todays tablets. 20 years from now, people will laugh at the fact we had Android tablets. But you will still own that book. With all it's memories attached.

Something I would like to add:

Document layout

Books usually come in a 2-columned, A4 or letter format with a lot of pictures, text boxes and a fancy background. Sometimes all of this has a poor contrast even as a real book (mostly due to the fancy backgrounds).

An e-book has to work for different screen sizes and at best populates pages dynamically (no need to scroll) while keeping boxes and pictures from braking the reading flow too much and displaying them correctly.

Sadly, nearly all RPG-related digital material I have ever seen is either

• Poorly translated to a native e-book format, e.g.:

  • Boxes are several pages long, begin mid-sentence and are hard to identify as special text.
  • Pictures clutter at the end of the document and are of poor quality.
  • It is impossible to differentiate section, subsection and paragraph headings.
  • Tables look horrible or do not work at all.
  • Non-ASCII characters do not work.

  Part of this might be due to the fact that there seems to be no standard on how e-books should be displayed (or there is one, but nobody adheres to it).

• Simple PDF copies of the books: Since for most readers, full-page view is not feasible, this means that you have to scroll a lot for the usual multi-column layout and even more so for pictures and boxes, because you have to guess where the sentence continues. If your reader can only support gray scale or just black and white, identifying pictures or even reading the text at all (fancy background, shading of boxes etc.) might be painful or downright impossible.

I work a lot with lecture-scripts or scientific papers digitally – annotating, bookmarking, crossreferencing etc. (And even scribble lecture notes or doodle on my tablet-pc with a digitizer-pen or graphics tablet.) But I always end up printing the stuff I need to frequently work with because hardly any papers or scripts are formatted in a way that makes it painless to work with them digitally (for about the same reasons as I stated above for RPG-material).

Formatting of digital media (other than webpages) mostly still follows the principles that have been established over centuries to give the best reading experience in impressão meios de comunicação.

Which (among what has been stated in other answers) is one of the most important aspects, why I usually prefer the book to the digital version with the same content – usually the content was written and/or formatted with a book in mind, not an e-book.

This easily reads as a matter of preference to me over anything. From a subjective standpoint I simply enjoy the smell of ink and paper and the feel of pages but from there... It's anyone's race really.

E-Books

• Portabilidade: The only reason I bring a laptop or e-reader to games is usually because the game is when I'm playing at the home of someone else or a neutral location of some sort. Call me lazy, but I'm less than enthused to carry my entire collection which with my AD&D stuff, is easily a dozen each hardback and soft cover books. Having digital copies saves me some potentially considerable effort to keep everything I need with me. Every game I have been a part of for any serious duration usually has several books and everyone needs only one or two pages from the extras but the whole book has to come along.

• Indexação: There are precious few books that have a pervasive index. Some are simply maddening because they will place an entry as a subsection of another instead of being its own listing. Searchable text has been a life saving feature that helps me even facilitate answers for this site because I can keep jabbing the "find next" button to make sure there isn't some hidden passage of errata in a different section of the book. I can go directly to what I want. Not only this, but I have a dyslexic player who uses the e-book to read aloud to him and that's the only way he learns the rules without a walkthrough mid-game.

• Errata: Some releases are digital only nowadays. Books can always be scanned for free, but new digital content costs to be printed (even if minutely... at first) and having a file is a resource that can be given back. Unless you choose to print on both sides (or use the back of an already printed page) that page is spent. Maybe line a birdcage with it but that's about it once you're done.

Spined Books

• Redundância: Murphy is my worst player. He corrupts files, drops books and readers alike, summons unholy deluges that permeate the stoutest bag as I dart from vehicle to building. A book can take a fair amount of damage before becoming useless. Even if it gets wet or torn, the other pages are still viable. A backup of files is cheap and easy but a backup of devices is frustratingly costly. Even if one book becomes totally useless, the rest should still be in good condition anyway.

• Psicologia: I can't agree more with PlasmaHH when it was stated that genuine books imply something about the DM/GM/ST. They usually mean business unless it's that rich friend who can piddle away money for books like they're tissue boxes. Every game I've been in where the DM is serious about their world, the content, and grasp of the rules they never subsumed on PDFs alone (although certainly had them where possible). It's kind of like the illusion a gym membership provides where by virtue of having spent good money on something, you want full value of the resource and hardback books are the most costly. Other than systems that went out of print before I was aware of them, everything I run I keep at least a core book hard copy for communal use if nothing else.

• Distribuição: Probably beating a dead horse with many of the answers explaining how using a genuine book means you can give media away without losing the entire medium to read it. However with some companies being notorious for bad binding, I've seen books split into binder volumes and individual pages given tot he players who need them and right back in the pot when they're done. No entry cost of time to find the right file, download, change storage device/upload to cloud, download to new device, open, find again for a one time use. Just give the page back when you're done.

• Wear & Tear lata be Your Friend: Believe it or not, the more a book is used, the more useful it gets in my experience. Several of my books have been opened and creased to specific pages I use so often that with a blind grab at the right depth of the volume I can open to the exact page I want to something I may not have thought to leave a bookmark on (digitally or literally). Typically any system's combat turn order, the start of its magic and skill sections become permanently held for intuitive indexing.

Equality/Trading Off

• Anotação: Familiarity breeds ease of use. I can place sticky notes or add comments with equal proficiency, as well as remember the page number (within ten pages) or randomly open to it in the book by approximate depth. These functions are synonymous to me because essentially they work the same by keeping custom information. In a hard copy you have limited space and might lose a sticky note or tucked index card where in an e-book you might have to guess where the comment trigger is to be found since it collapses.

• Multiple Pages: Como um subjetivo factor, being able to separate books and pages to be larger than a screen's resolution can accurately display helps me do the work faster. However! Using a laptop for almost all of my digital reading, I have been known to make a second copy of the core book in the folder so I can hold two pages simultaneously open in the same book without creating a conflict. I have on many occasions held three or four books open and traversed them as easily as my books splayed like scalemail when the situation called for it.

• Visibilidade: For hard copies of books the resolution is almost always perfect. It matches the size of the viewer (IE the book's physical size) and thus you can always see a full page at the proper reading size. While the viewing area is often limited on e-readers (I'm rarely displeased with monitors/laptops) the ability to zoom is surprisingly useful, especially for farsighted gamers. Granted, you can zoom with a mundane magnifying lens on a hard copy as well. But ultimately both methods fulfill the need equally to me objetivamente. I can shrink a window and hold two completely different sources side by side concurrently when not using an e-reader specifically for PDFs.

• Espaço: Being able to keep a library in a device the size of a 9v battery is quite handy... But where did you put that book on it? Unless you're a database generating fiend such as myself, you probably just have a big mess of books in one spot with no sorting method in place, which when you're looking at a series of identical icons can get tiresome. Sure hard copies take up space and weight but the visual indexing is powerful as is the mnemonic device of having to sort them as they go on the shelf (if you're even half as compulsive as me when it comes to books) and have at least two senses tied to their shelving - seeing the book slide into space, touching the book (as at least to me different publishers feel different in the slightest ways), maybe even smelling the book as you do. However, searchable indexing on most devices tends to alleviate this issue which is why it shows up in the "both" category instead of as a distinct advantage.

In addition to the excellent answers above, another factor that I can see is that dead-tree books IMHO relate better in feeling to their contents (at least for fantasy RPG, maybe not so much for sci-fi?).

What I mean by that is that often times the fantasy worlds that people play in are inspired by the technological state of the art of about late Medieval times. You have blacksmiths and swords and candles and that kind of stuff. While chronologically before the invention of the modular printing press (in the West), it seems to me that engaging with these worlds through "old-fashioned" paper books just feels more "in game" than using an ebook reader.

(Then again, your mileage may vary: people use their cell phones instead of dice and for calculating, too...)

As others have said - there's definitely something to be said about tactile navigation.

While digital formats (assuming they're text-parseable) can be searched, if you don't know the specific spelling or the specific term, they can be difficult to parse by hand. Quadruply so if the publisher did not provide bookmarks to the different chapters. (Which is realmente annoying, imo.)

By contrast, with a physical copy, you can pick up a general sense of where the desired content is physically located fairly quickly. For example: Combat Rules are towards the middle. Spell lists are towards the end. Character classes are near the beginning. The more familiar one is with the book, the quicker this is to process (and more accurate one tends to get).

Additionally - I stare at a digital monitor all day at work; then for most of the evening. So if I actually have to ler something, I'll opt for ink on paper, just to save my eyes that itty little bit. :)

(Kindles are awesome, but they can be slow; plus, some books have art work and/or tables that I am unsure would translate over very well.)

As a player, I feel being in much more experienced hands when seeing a GM that has a pile of books (usually accompanied by piles of papers/notes and other things), than one that has a laptop/kindle/tablet (sometimes even using it for [secret] dice rolls.

As an occasional and not very experienced GM I like having everything as books with me because:

• I have tons of sticky notes in the books that help me a lot
• I have lots of bookmarks for campaigns that I change/add during play
• Sometimes I correct/change/annotate directly in the book.
• I feel like copying a few pages sometimes is probably easier, but I never tried using a kindle for printing pages.
• I can have multiple books open at the same time
• With ad-hoc bookmarks I can - more or less - read at multiple points in the same book and can easier jump forth and back e.g. to evaluate rule interaction
• I can pass one book to a player for himself to read while keeping all the others at hand
• I can slap (or threaten to) people with a book (technically I can do that with a kindle too, but it would probably be more expensive).

And after all, in non-technological rpgs, it just feels cool, sitting there as if you are a librarian of an ancient library, filled with all kinds of secrets. I can remember some occasions where the lines were blurred and the PCs encountered myself in their world, in a level-up/learning situation.

I speak from experience, having DMed several D&D internet-published adventures both by printing them (when I had a working printer on my old PC), by reading from published books and by reading from my laptop.

When playing at my laptop I had problems with the following:

• showing images to players (easier with a tablet, or with a second linked screen)
• I had to do all the searches on the SRD myself. Sometimes, other players brought their laptops too, but they started being more distracted since laptops can also be used for gaming.
• Despite using a program to separate the maps, statblock and room description chapters in three different files, flipping pages was hard. Sometimes, finding the right file between those I had opened was time consuming.
• Having two or three monsters in a manual on different, distant pages, makes it hard to track the flipping. Scrolling is way less countable than flipping.

For novels and fiction I prefer a e reader. For reference I prefer paper. Why? The design teams for e readers focus on novels with the assumption that if you are going to do serious research you will use a computer. This is not a problem that can't be fixed, just one that hasn't been.

In addition to all the responses above, your collection of physical books are actually worth money and can be sold/traded to other collectors, unlike your collection of PDFs.