July 3, 2008: GURPS Thaumatology PDF Now Available

Errata are the bane of a publisher's existence. No matter how many editors and proofreaders go over a manuscript, words get misplaced or misspelled. And in game books, the potential to misstate a rule, or to switch two entries in a table, creates even more possible problems.

And when the book is over 270 pages long, with dozens of tables, the "possibility" of errata grows into "probability."

Modern technology offers a solution: let the book out as a PDF a couple weeks before it is sent to print. The loyal fans will provide extra eyes to track down and stomp those annoying errors. Thus, we have released GURPS Thaumatology.

(No, we're not the first publisher to do this. But as this is a first for us, we figured we should mention it.)

If you're a retailer, and worried about the effect on sales, we understand. However, we have had both digital and print versions of our GURPS Fourth Edition line available during the last year, and all the evidence indicates that digital sales do not significantly affect print sales. Basically, customers who want PDF won't be satisfied with print, and those who need pages in their hand aren't happy with electrons. If we thought this would slow the sales of the print version, we wouldn't do it. We believe this will result in a better book; that's why we're doing it.

If you're one of the aforementioned loyal fans, we'd like to send the files to the printer in mid-July, so if you find errata, please submit it before July 11. (We do, of course, want any errata you find after July 11, but we won't be able to incorporate it into the first print run.) And thank you!

(All errata will be corrected in the PDF as soon as possible, and registered purchasers can always re-download the file to get the most current version.)

This is an experiment, of course. We're testing the waters, and have no immediate plans to make this our standard operating procedure. But if it works out well . . .
-- Paul Chapman