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Deadlord wrote in Interesting Items Currently on eBay:But a PDF is not an original, Ian. The collector doesn't get the joy of THINKING he owns an original.
I liken it to a blind man's wife. She can be as ugly as Trump, but if she tells him she's as pretty as Scarlett Johansson and no one ever tells him differently, he believes he's married to a gorgeous woman. So in the end, does it really matter that he is not, aside from the lie? Now, obviously anyone who creates a fake book and sells it as an original should be hung by the grapes, but that aside, here's another example: a high-priced item is shrinkwrapped and looks perfect, but inside the book are four pages that have huge coffee stains. The only way anyone would ever know is if it was opened, which would pretty much never happen. So every collector who owns it has the pleasure of having a minty shrinked item.
When I was actively collecting, condition was never extremely important to me, aside from items that a canine has obviously used as a urine strainer. I was more concerned with owning one of each item, and not for the "I've got one and you don't" factor so much as the pleasure of looking through a book and seeing the art and content, and differences in printings. The advent of PDFs is part of the reason I paroled a lot of stuff to other collectors. Why have a Necromican sitting on my shelf collecting dust when all I really care about is the content? Better someone else have it who WILL enjoy ownership. And obviously the commercialization of RPGs didn't sit well with me. Once the days of sending a module to someone for free/pittance or a little less than you paid for it vanished, the romanticism of being a RPG collector died out for me. For the most part I only auctioned off items that several collectors wanted so as to give everyone a fair chance at it. The money was irrelevant.

For me it was always about being able to view the contents, so condition was important, and when PDFs began to be marketed by WoTC, FGG and JG etc, I jumped on that bandwagon and started funneling funds into buying PDFs rather than hardcopies. In the early days the quality of PDFs were poor, with companies knowing no more about PDFs and scanners than the average guy on the street, and once I realized I could produce better quality scans than the majority of the companies out there, I started digitizing my own collection. That's where cleanliness and quality of content came into its own.

Now of course the entire printing process is PDF based, so the quality of the PDF is dictated solely by the competence of the author/publisher, and I buy almost exclusively PDF unless I find a particularly well assembled physical product that warrants physical ownership.

冒険日誌 means "adventure journal" but I'm unsure what this is:

Yahoo Auction: プール・オブ・レイディアンス

grubbiv wrote in Interesting Items Currently on eBay:冒険日誌 means "adventure journal" but I'm unsure what this is:

Yahoo Auction: プール・オブ・レイディアンス

Yahoo auction?!? Does Yahoo run auctions??? (Moreover: is Yahoo still working?!?)

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Currently it comes less than 4 pounds per book...

Major heads-up for Ephemera collectors.

These vintage scribbles are on the backs of Ultra-Rare stationery: Tactical Studies Hobbies(TSH?)  at 542 Sage St. (Lake Geneva).


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Ooh. A whole plethora of IP breaches here, however, the seller is not publishing a TSR copyrighted product, because the book is not a TSR product. Someone else already edited and reformatted it and spliced it with other things. So WoTC may object on the basis of protecting content such as beholders or Greyhawk if they are contained within the book, but little else. EGG's estate may likewise object if EGG is named as a contributor, but it would be one persons word against another as to whether or not he did say they could attribute content to him personally, seeing as EGG cannot say whether he did or did not.

WoTC have a long history of having abandoned their IP, so past history indicates that this is a legitimate fan made product. It seems to be well produced and can pretty much be assured to be fairly unique, so the price seems reasonable for the time and effort put into assembling such a product by hand.

There is gonna be a lot of this sort of thing going forwards. The content is now free. It has zero chargeable value. So the only value anyone can charge for is presentation or historical reference. A original woody has value only because it is old. An original in mint condition has value because it is old and is presented in mint condition. If it is signed and authenticated as having been owned by an historically relevant person, then value is added there.

On the other extreme we have value being added here by quality of publication, attention to detail, choice of ruleset, binding etc. The seller hasn't just got a free PDF and sent it to Lulu for PoD. He has tried to distinguish his product in the marketplace. He hasn't lied. He's explained what he's done, and it seems to be paying off nicely for him.

So the real question is, why would someone pay for $100 for a hardbound copy of a free PDF, rather than print the PDF themselves and stick it in a binder. That seems like an easier question to answer.

red_bus wrote in Interesting Items Currently on eBay:
Agree here. I think this looks pretty cool and I like the way in which he has approached it and the extra organisation/information. Hope he gets a good price!

He's added content which he eludes to in his description, but isn't specific. The Greyharp PDF is only 78 pages long or so, which would only be 39 pages of double sided printing. A list of the added content would have been nice, but may also have compromised the sale if he is then asked if he indexed the book, or just left it to the user to dig through and find what he was looking for. Given that this may well have been personal use originally, and not a rinse repeat (although now he knows the price he can get that may well now be the case), I suspect this one was a case that he already knew what he used and where it was in the book.

$200 and rising. He's doing well.

Another one of these:  
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