I am a big proponent of PDFs, so I was pretty stunned by WOTC's decision. As you said, this only serves to keep the dedicated pirate about two hours behind the "street date" of whatever the newest book is. So it does nothing but frustrate the actual customer.

I have to wonder how difficult it would be to include a discount code or coupon in books that would allow the purchaser to download a PDF version either for free, or at a substantial discount after purchasing the paper copy.

It could even be something as simple as the old video game installation tricks, where you had to turn to page x in the manual and type in the 5th word or some such.

Perhaps a user would have to login with a valid e-mail address to receive the PDF. Thus even if someone "pirated" the password, you would still get the value from harvesting their e-mail address for future offerings/marketing.

Alternately, I actually purchased several Hero Games books on PDF back in 1998 or 1999 in my not-so-local game store. They came on floppy discs and were hanging on the wall just like miniatures or dice. A game shop with a computer, CD drive, 500 gb hard drive and a stack of prelabeled discs could pretty easily burn and sell any game PDF, right there in the store.

Or a store could even sell PDFs and copy them directly to an "official" USB jump drive with a company logo on it. I still have several 64 mb flash drives sitting around with the D&D; logo on them from Gen Con two years back. WOTC was giving them out like candy after the announcement of 4e.

I'd pay good money for Green Ronin jump drive loaded with a bunch of True 20 or M&M; books.