I can’t find the exact blog post, but some time in the last few months I had a throwaway line about how I was a little frustrated in how D&D’s digital assets were handled, particularly the fact that they are tied to platforms. That is to say, if I bought the 2024 Player’s Handbook on Roll20, I wouldn’t also have access to it on DnDBeyond. I think there are really 2 reasons this hasn’t blown up more: 1) many of the platforms only require the DM to purchase content (if it was required of all the players, I think there’d be a revolt) 2) D&D is still primarily an analog, pencil and paper game. That said, this issue has started to become a bit more relevant to me, so I wanted to get some ideas out there (and maybe vent a little).
Just a little under five years ago, I started looking at the possibility of Ebooks again. Two months later I bought a Barnes and Noble Nook. For a long time I was very casual with my Ebook reading. I had the Cory Doctorow books and several months worth of free Nook books which more than made up for the cost of the hardware. Really, the best part of fully digital distribution of books (and games) is revolutionary in the way it can allow the purchase of giveaway of media which would be cost-prohibitive if the company had to pay for the physical object or shipping fees. I installed Calibre for the free EPUBs, but it didn’t touch my Barnes and Noble purchases.
Until now I’ve been quite against ebooks. Back when I was in college I had an iPaq and I downloaded the Microsoft reader to it. I bought about 3 - 5 books for it and, at first, I thought it was great. It would allow you to annotate the book and highlight passages. And it was electronic so I could carry a bunch of books in the space of my PDA. But it was one of the first times I was bitten by digital restrictions management (DRM). I had to reset my PDA because it got into a locked state. After that, I couldn’t read my books until I reauthenticated the PDA. After all, everyone out there is out to destroy authors and steal digital books, so they need to make sure I’m the one who paid for it. This worked the first time around, but the second time I needed to authenticate, the server refused to authenticate the device and I could no longer read the books. So I was out around $20. Imagine buying a regular physical book and then having it no longer work because it wasn’t sure if you were the person who bought it. Yeah, it’s pretty ridiculous.
