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Go To Front Page Now. The Ebooks are Here

Holy. Living. Crap!!

Never mind the Traveller things (which is cool) - they've got a shedload of OTHER stuff from all the major companies. They're making all those books available as PDFs?!

Jeez. This could change the face of the whole RPG industry if it takes off!
 
They are eBooks unfortunately, and I can't seem to get the DRM stuff to work. Plus some of their stuff is pricely compared to the prices that go on RPGNow.com
 
Yes, but they have more of it. And new stuff too. And by god, they've even got Wraith: The Oblivion books! *swoon*

The DRM doesn't look too bad though:


From the FAQ
By default, we package our books with rights that allow you to print unlimited copies, copy 10 selections of text (or 10 pages if a selection spans multiple pages) to the clipboard every 10 days.
Click to expand...
 
Hmm, Mage the Ascension books. Call of Cthulhu PDFs (coming soon).

Well I'm not buying anything off them until I can get the free downloads to work. At the moment they just open up an empty version of Acrobat and it sits there, no data coming down.
 
Well, I got it to work... you've got Adobe Acrobat Reader 6, yes? It won't work on earlier versions. How far did you get with it?
 
Yeah, I was just gonna post that you need Reader 6, how annoying for me at least. My Mac only has OS9.1 and I need at least 10.1 for Reader 6.

I do notice that I only need Win98 for Reader 6 which works back to about OS8 on the Mac so what's up with that? Oh well I guess I'll have to finish reintializing the old PC to check it out.
 
There's a Troubleshooting Guide there in case you have problems with the DRM. I dunno if that would address any of Ben's problems.

EDIT: Me no can tell when to use href or URL
 
On another issue with the site is anybody else having problems with logging on with IE? I keep getting a "Data Encryption Error" when I try. Is this just another Mac issue? Not that I expect anyone to know, just asking on the off chance.
 
Ah, thanks for the link Malenfant, right there in ascii. Known problem with Macs and IE. Ah well. Mac unfriendlies I guess, IE/MS that is, not DriveThru in this case.
 
You on a slow connection, Ben? The Exalted PDF they have for free there is a 7 MB download - maybe it's taking its time downloading it?
 
Hmm. Odd. I installed the reader and downloaded the Exalted PDF and it worked fine. Then all the DRM management stuff kicked in and I had to follow the links to the Adobe website to get an Adobe ID so I could activate the files on my computer.

I had a slight problem when it tried to open the confirmation file with Acrobat 5 (I have the full version of that and don't want to get rid of it!)instead of the Acrobat 6 reader, but I just right-clicked the link to the file and it downloaded it and I could drag the file onto the Acrobat 6 icon to open it - it worked after that.
 
You can actually download the Exalted PDF? How did you manage that? It opens a blank Acrobat page for me.
 
Ah got it working eventually. Right clicked to download the Exalted transfer file, that sorted everything out once I ran it. That was not clear at all.
 
I bought a book from them (had some money sitting in my Paypal account, which they can take). Pretty damn fast... you pay for the ebook with paypal, download the book, and voila it's on your PC. Superb.

The image scans are sufficiently clear - they could be a bit better, but it's good enough to read. The book I picked was the Shadow Players Guide for Wraith:The Oblivion (9 dollars+instant delivery there, or 45 dollars+postage+"wait til it gets here from the US" from the one online FLGS I found it at). No prizes to guess why I went for the eBook! This is one of those weird books with white text on black background and so the scan is probably unusually difficult to read, but I can manage. The normal black text on white background stuff prints out just fine though on the scanned image books and is perfectly legible. Be warned that these "scanned image" books are likely to be several tens of Megabytes in size though.

Wow. If this catches on and they get more stuff in, I may never go to an FLGS again...!
 
Well I have bought quite a lot from RPGNow in the past. The main problem I can see with DriveThru is their prices are a little high (some of the PDFs are the same price as the actual book), and the DRM stuff may make it a pain. Now I don't condone sharing PDFs and I insist all my players buy their own if they want copies, but it is nice to be able to stick them on a CD and run them on any PC when I need to which is something that won't really work with the DRM.
 
I think that's what the activation thing is for though - you tell it what PCs you're allowing it to run on. Presumably you wouldn't want to run it on a zillion machines, just on a couple.

I think this is better than rpgnow though, since it has a lot of current stuff that was previously print-only. Plus they have Wraith and GDW stuff ;) . I'm just amazed that they started with so much nifty material available!
 
[sarcasm]
wow! that was exciting!
[/sarcasm]

Warning: mysql_pconnect(): Too many connections in C:\webroot\catalog\includes\functions\database.php on line 17
Click to expand...
God how I love great websites....
-MADDog
 
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