Would you purchase a Army Book PDF?

[eron12]

I think I would be willing to pay up to $15 for an army I played. (so I selected the $20 option). Now if the books were $7.50 or so I would probably buy all of them. I pay that now for certain old armybooks, so I could do that for new pdf versions.

[BigbyWolf]

I buy hard copies, then scan them for use on my kindle (for personal use, officer). The books are expensive, so I like to keep the originals in as good a condition as possible. Having portable copies allow me to do this.

I certainly wouldn't pay full price for a pdf, I'd suggest that every actual book bought comes with a code/ voucher giving you a free (or cheap, like up to £5) download of the pdf for that book.

[Askari]

If they were half price of the true books I'd probably still save up for my own armies books but perhaps get the odd PDFs for armies I didn't collect. For say, £10 I'd probably get all the books apart from my own armies ones (and even then, acquire a pdf for the books I buy just to have them all in one place nice and tidy.)

[Ratbeast]

Cost a buck or two and i actaully had an ipad, maybe

[Gertjan]

I believe they should give a code for a digital download or something like that with every hardcopy they sell (no, I'm not joking). Even the last few dvd's I bought had a code that allowed me to download an additional digital copy, can't see why GW wouldn't be able to do that. Besides ofc me not being interested in things that are single platform only, a pdf is usefull, a Ibookpadthingy isn't as I shall never get one. Other than that, there's always the option to make/find your own pdf I would say, at least it's legal here where I live.

[Durloth]

Most of GWs publications are of course already available in PDF format already, if you're not too concerned about copyrights and such. I've found that while having the rule books on my phone seemed like a nice idea, I never actually used them over the physical copies and have deleted the PDFs I had.
As long as they make physical books, I'll keep buying them no matter the price difference. The only way that might change would be if the army-book PDFs came with some kind of built in army builder software.

[superdupermatt]

£25 for a digital copy is ridiculous, why buy that when you can have an actual physical copy for the same price? If it was £10 cheaper it'd still be to expensive. I wonder what reasoning they have for the price?

[chromedog]

In answer to the question, NO. I would not buy a pdf army book.

The poll answer: Only if it was free. My Infinity lists are like this - but they are also in the hardcopy rulebooks I own.

I prefer a physical copy of a book. The tactile sensations of flicking through the pages beats tapping a screen.
All of the pdfs I use have been printed out for this reason.

[spaghettyhoop]

I would buy an army book PDF yes, and I dont think it should cost a tiny fee. Like has been mentioned, it is no different than other eBook suppliers. 20% cheaper than the physical copy is in line with most other publishers, so i dont see why a PDF for an army book costing 20 is out of order. (obviously it can be argued that the hard version is over costed to start with, but that isnt for this thread)

With that in mind, the marine codex they just released isnt a PDF. Its an interactive version,with a lot of extra pages, and a lot of advantaged over a PDF. I havent tried it yet (tablet is android or I would buy it) but im not writing it off without seeing it properly first.

[Little Joe]

Max. $10 in addition to my hard copy for a referable and regularly updated PDF. The extra cash would be for the service and makes the army book almost worth it.

[Poncho160]

I finally was convinced to get a Kindle ealier this year and apart from The Emperors Gift, I haven't bought a paper book since. I love my Kindle. The books are cheaper, more accsessible and the kindle has lots of nice liitle functions. As soon as the Kindle Fire hits the UK i'll be getting one of them.

I would happily get Codexes / Army books for my Kindle, but not at the price GW are selling them for. I'd buy them if they were cheaper than the print versions, so about £15 / roughly $25.

[sakura_ninja]

No
No
No
And to further reinforce my previous statement NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

especially if you have to have a crummy Apple product.

[theunwantedbeing]

I'm fine paying a small amount to download music, all I need is for the music to be readily accessible and able to be played conveniently.
I don't see much point in CD's anymore as my collection is too large to be on a large stack of CD's and it would make it far too time consuming to find the required music.

A GW book just isn't in the same category in my opinion.
There isn't a large enough amount of GW armybooks to make me want something quicker and easier to use, similarly I don't need to be able to carry my entire collection around when I play a game, I need just the rules for the army I am using and picking that out of a stack of 20-30 books is incredibly easy.

So I couldn't get myself to pay for a digital copy of the rules.

I'de need the digital copy to be fantastic and the physical copy to be aweful for me to want to pay for the digital copy.

[unknown_lifeform]

Its about time, I see this as the future. I already use an army builder app on my smartphone rather than carting around numerous army lists and the size of GW's hardback army books and core rulebooks makes carrying them around difficult. Being able to carry around all your rulebooks, FAQs, supplements and army lists around on an e-reader for all the games I play would be very attractive.

The snag is the price - an electronic copy would have to be a fair bit cheaper than a physical version. My two preferred pricing models would be either a free download when you buy a physical copy of the book or a cheaper trimmed down e-book with just the rules at a reasonable price. Since selling anything at a markdown would seem to be anathema to GW I believe what will actually happen is they try and charge full price and get very limited uptake.

Also, they'd have to release it for non-apple products for me to show an interest since I refuse to touch them with a barge pole.

[papabearshane]

As I have an Army book addiction (I own all of them and buy the new ones even for armys I dont curently collect) I would only pay $5-10 for the PDF versions. Having a book is just so much better then a PDF file IMOP.

[Asensur]

I've not voted, because my answer is:

I'm not going to buy an (expensive) IPad for a digital book copy.


They can make me spend all the money I have for my hobby, but not for an awful tablet (worst technical support, ever).

However, if they use another platform to sell their digital copies I could buy them.

[DaemonReign]

I can't vote either Lord Dan..
Bottom option should have been:
'Not interested under any circumstance, regardless of cost'.

I do have one of those flashy touch-screen pads. That's not it. I use Army Builder. But I prefer the books to be 'physical'.

[Tupinamba]

I´d by them for 5-10 bucks, and then I´d probably buy all of them. For my own army, I´d still go for the paper version, but it´d be a realistic (and legal..) way of getting the other books for fluff and reference, which I´d certainly not do with expensive, hardcover books that will become obsolete in 4-7 years.

As someone said before, pdfs are already easily available via piracy. It would be a good thing to have a legal and better quality way to getting them, for which I would spend some money. However, only for PCs.

[sakura_ninja]

I wonder if gw realizes this would probably increase the piracy of there books.

[Texhnolyze]

Seems that the only thing we do here is whining about GW.

To be fair, they can't price the itunes book lower than the physical book.
They are have roughly the same content, so if they were cheeper than the physical book, people would get the digital copy instead.

Also the reason it is only on itunes is because it is so easy to pirate things from the android devices that it would be stupid of them to release it there before these issues are resolved. (i got both android and iOs devices)