Why Won't You Take My Money?

The internet is a disruptive technology, and no one has yet fully grasped what its implications will be.

It gutted the recording industry, and its corpse has lain on the roadside, a warning and prophecy to others. And the ravenous eyes of the internet lolled next lolled at publishing.

Like the recording industry, recent technologies have made the sharing of digital books insanely easy, and the line between “sharing” and stealing/piracy is a thin one.

Digital sharing technologies sliced open the neck of the recording industry. CD sales went from 750 million units in the early 90s to just over 200 million this past year.

And while it is easy to see that the recording industries attempts to stop this bleed out (lawsuits, digital rights management technology, etc.) failed utterly, still publishers are trying these same tactics against the monster internet, hoping for a different result.

Technology always wins in the end. 

Unless the publishing industry finds a different model, its corpse will litter the road beside that of the recording industry.

The model of the Catholic Church comes to mind here. The Catholic Church had in the middle ages proven itself quite adept at crushing local heresies when they popped up in Europe. Send in some knights, kill everyone, let God sort them out, etc. And when the heresy of Lutheranism sprang up, they trotted out the same old playbook, but this time if failed. And why? Because of the disruptive technology of the printing press. Killing heretics is only effective when they are isolated geographically and small in number. The printing press allowed protestant ideas to spread so widely and quickly that the Catholic Church could not keep up, and its religious monopoly on power in Europe was forever shattered.

Now publishing industry, if the Catholic Church could not rollback the changes of the printing press by burning people at the stake, what do you think you can do against the internet by pretending it does not exist? Technology always wins in the end.

Which brings me, really, to my point. Yesterday I wanted to buy a PDF of a classic Dungeons and Dragons module from the 80s, Ravenloft. I went to Amazon and DriveThruRPG, and while there are numerous PDFs of books from that time period available for purchase, this one was not. Likely because the module was so popular that it was expanded in the early aughts into a longer, more expensive book which is available for PDF sale. I already own said book in print, and wanted the original to compare the two.

I suspect that the cheaper, earlier, and possibly better module was unavailable for sale, lest its purchases cannibalize those of its more recent and expensive counterpart.

The company that runs Dungeons and Dragons, Wizards of the Coast, took all PDFs off the market six years ago in response to piracy. Just year, they began selling PDFs again, but Ravenloft is not among them.

But when I go to Google and type in Ravenloft PDF, the second item that pops up is of course an illegal and free download of the book. So much for combatting piracy.

Now I am not interested in stealing the book. The company deserves money for their product. Furthermore, I want to give the company my money in return for their product but they won’t sell it to me!

The situation is absurd, and like a beer-lover during Prohibition, I am forced into the quandary of abstaining or going outside the law.