RPG books in epub/mobi

I'll come out and say that I love the ebook format. Its so simple, easy and light and can be read on just about any device. I want it to be the future of rpg book publishing. I understand that many people don't like it for rpg books. What are your opinions?

I'm new to ebooks, having only read a couple on my iPad or phone, but I have many PDFs of RPG books on my iPad, which I find awesomely useful at the gaming table. What I don't know is, many RPG books are rife with tables and artwork, and epubs tend to render the pages organically, making fixed layout an anachronism of the distant past. Does that change the quality or usefulness of an RPG book as a reference manual? A hyperlinked table of contents or index may only get you so far.

I have a bunch of PDFs, though I've never seen an epub/mobi RPG book, so I can't comment to how good it is, but I can imagine its fantastic.

You can get Fate Core, Fate Accelerated, and the System Toolkit I believe all in ePub/Mobi format. And Core/Accelerated are on a pay what you want, so you can get it free if you like.

Personally, I love the idea of ebooks for RPGs, but find them problematic. The small file size and scalability of the text is fantastic! But when using it for a reference book isn't the best. With a PDF or physical book, you can say, "On page XX, it says this." Ebooks don't have page numbers. Granted, it's easier to do a search for specific text within an ebook, so that may be a moot point.

Also, the lack of physical pages is a difficult hurdle to get over. When reading the ebook you don't have that "Page 18 of 237" in the corner of your screen letting you know how far into the book you are. Pages, whether physical or digital, give readers a sense of scale; a sense of progress. Page count is the standard method of talking about how big a specific book is. Fate Accelerated is 48 pages, digest size. I say that and most people know what size to expect when they see it. But if someone were to tell you that Fate Accelerated is "only 14,000 words," a majority of people have no concept of what that would look like, either on the page or in-hand.

One of the biggest upsides of ebooks is also it's greatest weakness: it's an HTML file. That means no file-bloat for fancy background pictures or page decorations. But that also means no fancy background pictures or page decorations! Layout means nothing in ebooks, since it's all flowing text. Sure, it'll make the tables fit somehow, and turning the device landscape makes it easier to read them, but sidebars are now all inline text, and pictures are too! This means that you can't have text side-by-side with an image.

As a gamer, I'm all for ebooks. PDFs are such huge files! But as a layout guy…I like my fixed-dimension "archaic" pages, even if they are digital ones.

I'm pretty sure you can do sidebars in epub using the float property. I haven't tried it, but now I need to.

And an unordered list would work much better than a table, I think.

The major downside of ebooks as opposed to PDF is that PDFs can be really pretty, while ebooks, by design, aren't. It's a trade-off between prettiness and small file size, you can have one or the other, but not both.

I've seen this discussion happening a bit too often over the past three days across the interwebs for RPGs. Why?

I'm a fan of PDFs myself. Just throw it on the iPad and i'm ready to go for a while. ePub/mobi can be good when dealing with file size, but eh.. I don't find that to be particularly an issue.

Totally in agreement with @EldritchFire

PDFs are tough to use across many devices. I have a kindle ereader, a phone and a nook tablet. I like to be able to read my books across all of them. PDFs make that hard. I realize I'm a minority in my opinion but I really think a reflowable format is a positive thing. And simple layouts can be very pretty. You just have to look at the Burning Wheel Gold book for that.

The future has change in store for the RPG industry. How could it not? PDFs will not be the end format for our books and I'm excited to see how the industry embraces new formats.

Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy ebooks, too. I just don't have enough of them—nor use them often enough—to have a concrete opinion on them.

It's a change that I hope to see more publishers do, even if it's just "an experiment" to see how it goes over with the digital crowd.

PDFs are a pain in the adze on a small format device. On my phone (Galaxy S4 which is not a small phone) I'm constantly pinching and panning. I think that a freeflow text format RPG would work so much better, just unsure how the pretty pretty layout that has become the norm in modern RPGs will suffer. Maybe PDF/paper versions remain, but also ebook versions sold separately or bundled with PDFs, with the ebook versions stripped of some of the pics and layout to take advantage of the format?

That's basically how they are doing it for the Dresden Files books.

The biggest hurdle with that is the time requirement. It's a snap to output the printer-ready file as a PDF, but to strip out just the text and pictures, and reformatting it all to an ebooks isn't worth the money to publishers right now. Fred Hicks has mentioned this several occasions in regards to Fate books and Monster of the Week.

A few other independent publishers I've asked about ebook versions have said similar things, sadly.

If it wasn't for my 10" tablet, I wouldn't love .pdf's so much. Since I have a tablet, though, the .pdf's are awesome. Easily organized, searchable, and fully color. I've got everything from D&D to Edge of the Empire and Deadlands on there.

Yeah without my big tablet, pdfs would be a pain.

The electronic file, for me, offers an alternative. My opinions on this are that, I love the convenience of e-texts. I can have an entire game library at my fingertips in an easy to carry device. A meal and a library for something that can easily be transported in a backpack. And they are often cheaper than the full text. However, I find that, a quality tablet capable of getting the most out of e-formats can be expensive. An iPad is what, $500? Then the cost of the files? Even at $50 a piece, the three core books for any game is significantly cheaper. Then there's the issue of whether or not this is practical. Maps on a pdf? Pain in the neck without buying some kind of projector, which is another cost. As a personal note as well, I get tired of looking at screens all day. Oddly, none of these things increase efficiency. We've tested this with my weekly group and looking stuff up n a printed book is about the same speed as looking the same material up in an e-book, so that's kind of a push. These are my thoughts on using the two formats. Both good in their own way, but hard to argue one should replace the other.

I do like searching up something with the find command in a digital copy of a source book... Also I use to twitch when I'd try to turn to a page and not be able to since I lent it to someone and now pages are stuck together by some sticky substance like soda or snack shrapnel.

Much to my chagrin, I've swiped a page in a physical book and then been momentarily baffled when the display didn't change.

The convenience of epub is great. Unfortunately, it's often an afterthought in publishing. I've seen many texts, not just RPGs, that have clearly been converted to epub after the fact, by what appears to be OCR run on the published text. Even in cases where epub versions are made without scanning another version of the text, there are still idiotic formatting, proof, and copy-editing errors that aren't in the PDF/print versions...which means that, in those instances, the people doing formatting and layout are not waiting for final edited text before they begin. Madness.

In general, I use four versions of a game (or just two, if soft-copy versions are not available), each for different purposes:
1) Print copy of the game: reading for pleasure or for the first read, sharing with other players for reference during a game.
2) PDF copy of the game: casual reading in short bursts or at unexpected times, personal reference of lists during a game (skill lists, spell lists, etc)
3) epub version: reading for research, reading to quote a particular passage of text, reading to help me make the fourth version
4) my quick reference version: Every game I run, I make a summary sheet for random character generation and another for system mechanics. Character generation can be as long as 12 pages; system reference is rarely more than 4. Simply put, I use this version to run and play games.