I am a big Traveller fan, and Far Future and Marc Miller are putting Traveller V5 in PDF format and selling the CD. Actually they have T5 in PDF format on the Citizens of the Imperium forums only available to people like me who paid for T5 in advance and let us become beta testers for the new gaming system and allow us to give feedback on the new T5 changes. Oddly enough, the T5 PDF files, while not copy protected or even watermarked, never found their way to file sharing networks unlike a lot of old RPG and Gaming materials already have. Most Traveller fans don't want Traveller to die out, so they refuse to pirate the PDF files for T5 and Mongoose Traveller, despite a lot of the Classic Traveller, etc stuff already been scanned and put on file sharing networks already.
In some cases, piracy of the Classic Traveller materials got enough people interested in the new T5 materials to buy them, and some even buy the Classic Traveller CD set from Far Future to support Traveller and make sure that it survives to the new settings and new T5 system. In the early days of Baen's Webscription service (and before their free CDs became a regular event) I saw more than one request in one of the book-pirating newsgroups for one of the newly-released Baen titles generate quite a few pointed replies to the effect that the original poster go buy it from Baen because 'they do ebooks right.'
I think most observers would agree that when ebook pirates (who get most books at zero cost and virtually zero effort) are willing to come out and castigate someone in their midst for not wanting to pay a reasonable rate for something that they'd otherwise steal at a higher price-point, then Baen is on to something, there.
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In some cases, piracy of the Classic Traveller materials got enough people interested in the new T5 materials to buy them, and some even buy the Classic Traveller CD set from Far Future to support Traveller and make sure that it survives to the new settings and new T5 system. In the early days of Baen's Webscription service (and before their free CDs became a regular event) I saw more than one request in one of the book-pirating newsgroups for one of the newly-released Baen titles generate quite a few pointed replies to the effect that the original poster go buy it from Baen because 'they do ebooks right.'
I think most observers would agree that when ebook pirates (who get most books at zero cost and virtually zero effort) are willing to come out and castigate someone in their midst for not wanting to pay a reasonable rate for something that they'd otherwise steal at a higher price-point, then Baen is on to something, there.
Just one observation from the peanut gallery.