A selection of books from Vampire: The Masquerade 2nd Edition are available for the next two weeks on the Bundle of Holding! You can get a bunch of great classic Vampire books for cheap, and 10% of the proceeds will go to Rich Thomas’ chosen charity, The Dream Foundation.
The Player’s Collection includes VTM 2e, the Vampire Players Guide 2nd Edition, and the Player’s Guide to the Sabbat, retail value $40, for only $8.95!
If you pay more than the threshold price (which changes over time, but currently $24.26), you also get the Storytellers Collection, including A World of Darkness 2nd Edition, Chicago by Night 2nd Edition, The Storytellers Handbook, The Kindred Most Wanted, Who’s Who Among Vampires: Children of the Inquisition, and the Storytellers Handbook to the Sabbat, a retail value of $56.
Oh, BLESS you for this! I’ve been itching to get some of those titles in PDF, and now I can justify it to my better half, both at price point and in making the world a better place. However…
Oh, CURSE you for this! Now I’m going to have even MORE books to constantly consult, AND I’ll have an unreasoning need to fill out all of my Vampire: the Masquerade collection in digital format now!
Er, you know that I’m all for damnation, so the two things above should never be seen as mutually exclusive.
I just bought this and was saddened to see that the metadata in the PDF files is not complete or even correct in nearly all cases. This unfortunately is a disappointing trend in all e-publishing but I hope that Onxy will help be part of the solution.
Book titles, authors, ISBN reference numbers, etc are not correct for most of the titles when imported into any pdf viewer.
Additionally no summary/description is provided for any of the books either. (Simply importing the files into Calibre – http://calibre-ebook.com will show these issues readily).
Worst of all though is that the Children of the Inquisition book doesn’t include the correct cover image, whereas the rest of the items have high resolution cover images this item this book comes with high resolution title page.
Given that most modern PDF collection applications (e.g. iBooks) sort automatically and display books by default using their cover image this leads to undesirable outcomes.
Can you please correct and update the files on drivethruRPG (and in other distribution channels) to contain such useful information and bug fixes?
It would really improve the usefulness of your publications for those of us who rely on PDF products for our RPG needs.
Thank you,
David Nielsen
I’d suggest making a comment on DriveThruRPG’s site about this, to make sure that the delivery side knows about it. I’ve made the same comment to them regarding the Children of the Inquisition, and more comments may help make something good happen? It’s possible…
I’ve contacted them with regards to this issue and I also encouraged them to adopt a quality policy with regards to the e-publishing products they resell.
I am really hopefully for the future of e-published RPG products (and e-publishing in general, I have switched entirely to e-books and have not looked back). The present is encumbered by little bumps like these metadata issues. I suspect it is mostly a matter of making publishers aware of them and helping to provide workflows, applications and formats that help them take it into account.
I do though keep hoping I can convince a publisher to take a chance and release something that leverages all ebooks can do. Right now we mostly get PDFs of the layouts they send to be printed.
These aren’t visually that easy to read on a tablet, mostly due to size differences and the heavy use of text overlaid on images.
They also do not take advantage of everything a modern format like .ibooks can do, e.g. the chance to embed examples of play as slideshows. Embed videos to illustrate concepts and so on. Not to mention the practical usefulness of distribution channels such as ibooks and kindle to push errata updates.
But that is a project for another time, for now I’d be super happy just to help get this little niggle ironed out and make the world a little bit better.