GEDC0065

I am now at GenCon, the original gaming convention and now a huge event attended by dozens of gaming and media companies with an attendance in excess of 30,000 people. I’ve spent the last couple of hours mostly wandering around the dealer room, though I did get in a 30 minute interview with self-publishing writer Michael Stackpole that I will post when I have time to transcribe. It is still an impressive event.

The game industry was one of the first sectors of publishing to embrace e-publishing fully. As Stackpole pointed out during our interview, game companies have been selling PDFs for years and discovering that they did not in fact cannibalize print as much as was feared. There are game companies that publish primarily electronically, and that publish their print lines electronically as well.

As I mentioned here before, Steve Jackson Games began its own e-publishing arm as a way to post out-of-print books that would never see print again, but before they knew it they were e-publishing printed games months in advance and seeing little or no fall-off in print sales from their expectations.

While I’m here, I hope to interview some of these people or companies about their e-publishing or self-publishing experiences. I will also try to attend some of the panels here involving writing, and report on them. I will post again when I have more to report.

1 COMMENT

  1. Gaming books are one of the few niches where customers would likely enjoy both a print and digital version. No ebook readers are good at flipping through pages or jumping back and fort between multiple sections, which is common for gaming books–but the search function for PDFs is also very useful.

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