Sunday, June 17, 2007
The Death of Print
Cheers and Jeers
Wargames Journal recently announced that it’s abandoning its print edition and returning to a free pdf download. That’s sad news, for it had quickly become my favorite magazine.
But I don’t find it surprising. I honestly think that printed magazines are going the way of the dinosaur. I recently stopped subscribing to a couple of computer magazines because I frankly can find anything they offer online. Just as important, the printed material is of necessity a couple of weeks—if not months—old, while the online information is far more timely. I’ve also made the decision to cut in half the number of hobby magazines that I get (golf and wargaming). Most of the stuff they offer, I can get in a more timely fashion online.
Online magazines also have the illusion of being free. I say illusion, because you pay for them by looking at advertising, just as “free” television is ad supported. (I am always annoyed by the people who think they are being clever in using ad blocking software. If enough people block the ads, then there is no incentive for people to produce material, and the publishers will quit, leaving us all poorer. Then the ad blockers will complain about the decline of the free stuff on the internet, without ever realizing their complicity in the slide.)
With the increasingly reduced cost of color printing—color lasers are the wave of the future—it makes sense to have magazines available as a download and to allow people to print those parts that interest them. But in fact, I think that even the magazine format is dead. I think that it makes more sense to me to offer the articles individually, as they are produced, rather than packaging them.
This site (MiniatureWargaming.Com) is a good example of that. Rather than offering a link a day, I suppose that I could wait until the end of the month and then offer thirty or so links, hobby news and commentary in a digest format. But where’s the immediacy in that? The Miniatures Page also offers info as a continuous stream. You keep going back to see what’s new.
I also think that the day is coming when printed versions of rules set will disappear. Already, forward thinking publishers, such as Two Hour Wargames offer pdf downloads for immediate satisfaction. If the rules are in black and white, I can print the rules on my laser. With printed versions, there is generally enough of a discount that I can afford the cents a page that my laser printer expends in consumables. A pdf version also allows me to print an extra copy or two of some relevent and pressing section for people to reference during a game. (Puplishers who just dont’ get it are the ones who charge the same for a download as for a printed version).
Drive Through RPG and a couple fo other similar sites offer hundreds of rules sets at relatively cheap download prices.
But I’ll go a step even further. I think that the day is coming when rules sets are all offered for “free.” As this site proves, there is an amazing amount of material available for free online. And for those who want to reap some financial reward for their efforts, there are a variety of ways to do so.
The easiest is to join an online advertising program, such as Yahoo! publishers, Adbrite, Performics, Chitika or Google. These can all produce a small, but steady income stream. You won’t get rich, and you won’t be able to quit your day job, but the same holds true selling printed rules sets through the mail and at conventions. Start a website that consists of a download page, slap on a couple of ads and watch the money trickle in. (Unless everyone uses an ad blocker. Then you won’t make any money and will have to return to selling hard copies at $30 a pop. The o-so-clever ad blocker guy will then have to pay real cash, and will complain about the high price of rule sets, never realizing what he has done).
If you’re offering a rules set free for the downloading, why not approach a manufacturer or two and get them to advertise in the content of the rules? Rules sets have for some time had manufacturer ads in them. If you’ve got a Napoleonic rule set, offer to include a live link in the pdf to the web site of a seller of Napoleonic figures. You could even include a photo or two of their figures in action in the text of the rules.
The nice think about an electronic version is that you can vary the ads. Publishers could take a page from magazines, offering ads on various pages at different rates for set period of time. Every couple of months, you could put up a new version fo the rules with new ads.
Or take the Gillette razor approach. Give away the basic rules and sell the add-ons. (Gillette made his fortune by giving away handles and selling the blades that fit them).
Again, no one is going to take in bucketsful of money (there are not buckets full of money to be had anywhere in the wargames industry). But the distribution costs are virtually nil. There are no printing costs (printing books is an enormous up front outlay). And owning a website is very cheap—as little as a couple of bucks a month. You can even get your rules hosted for free. I, for example, am more than willing to host your rules and bear the bandwidth costs, as I have with the fine Instant Thunder rules found here at MiniatureWargaming dot Com.
Another advantage of online publishing is that it eliminates errata sheets. When you make a mistake in a hard copy edition, it is prohibitively expensive to fix it. That’s why publishers offer errata sheets. But in an online version, you can make the correction, renumber the rules version to 1.1 and replace it on the website at no cost but time.
In an online version of rules, you also can continually upgrade and expand. Hard copy publishers have to wait until they have enough material (and have made enough money) to warrant a “supplement”.
I have been working on a rules set for some time now and am close to releasing a version (next six months or so). And when I do, you can be sure that it’ll be free and online.
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Good article.
More and more quality rule sets are being offered for free via the net, but at the same time, several of the rules sets that are arguably the most popular ones out there (40K, WHFB, FOW, etc.) are some of the most expensive books out there. These books offer the gamer everything under one cover (or set of covers): rules, army lists, painting guides, scenarios and ‘fluff.’
Those folks that want everything spoon-fed to them will continue to pay for printed matter while others (more historical gamers than fantasy/SF IMO) will lean more towards free rules since they’re more than likely already floating in books, Ospreys and other supporting materials and are just looking for the right rules.
Also, at an average of $8 per issue, there’s only so much money I’d put into buying wargaming magazines per month. More than one or two starts to seriously eat into my lead fund. I used to buy every issue of Miniature Wargames & Wargames Illustrated when it came out, but no more.
Another issue I have about mags is that eventually they all have to start covering the same ground they used to. I used to subscribe to Wargamer’s Digest in the early 1980s and after about 3-4 years I noticed what I thought were similarities in articles. Going through my back issues I figured out the editor was recycling old issues verbatim just to fill up the page count. Needless to say I dropped my sub next year.
Posted by Kutusov on 06/23 at 08:26 PM | #