Note: Our print-on-demand program is currently on hold, but at this point our goals with that program once we restart it haven't changed much, so a lot of this column is still valid. I've tried to revise it to be current.

Back in the old days, when dinosaurs ruled the world, roleplaying games came in a variety of forms -- books, booklets, in magazines, in box sets, in box sets with maps, even in box sets with vinyl hand puppets. Then the dinosaurs died off, Amazon.com was born, and somewhere in the middle roleplaying games became almost exclusively books, often thick enough to drop on a bug and be assured of a fatality. We've generally followed this model of release with all of our game lines in the past.

Nowadays, we have alternatives again. We can buy electronic books. We can buy books that aren't physically printed until we order them. We can even get a free version of the game to try out and see if we like it before we buy it. As a company, we're still exploring the potential these new technologies are giving us, but there's more opportunities there than simply making PDF versions of our hardcover books.

I've already talked a bit about what alternative products mean to White Wolf in a previous eQuarterly, so I won't repeat a lot of that material here. Instead, I want to focus on the print-on-demand initiative in particular, as well as why not all of our products will be always available in all our alternative forms.

Starting from the last point, let me be specific: we won't offer everything in PDF or PoD or a traditional print run. Some books will be just traditional printing, traditional and PDF, PDF and PoD, or just PDF. Sometimes, we choose not to offer it in a particular format for business reasons. Sometimes, the time and effort to convert it from one format to another doesn't match our projected return on the project. Sometimes, it's just not possible for technological or logistical reasons. And unfortunately, there are times when we can't say why. But print-on-demand allows us to provide books we wouldn't normally be able to produce. Aside from my oft-mentioned Mind's Eye Theatre: The Awakening, we will also have PoD versions of two smaller Exalted offerings: The Imperfect Lotus and The Mandate of Heaven. Again, more of these exclusive-to-alternative-publishing projects will be coming in the future (such as the upcoming New Wave Requiem, which is currently slated to be PDF-only but we hope will eventually have a PoD run).

I constantly hear how surprised people are by the quality of print-on-demand books. There are people who think that their book will come with plastic covers and a spiral or comb-binding, and that's just not true. Print-on-demand books are full-blown books, just like ones you can get in a bookstore. They have some differences from our other printed books (slightly different paper stock, mostly, and the spines look a little different), but at a casual glance it's hard to tell a PoD book apart from a traditional print run book. When I first started working out the process for our PoD books, we used the files for Scroll of Kings for our initial printing proofs. Now, the original Scroll of Kings is also softcover, and at one point both copies were on my desk. The only way I was able to tell them apart was to stand them both on my desk (the PoD version was an eighth of an inch taller than the traditional version). Otherwise, I would be hard-pressed to know which book I needed to give back to Brian to put back into his reference library.

But let's move away from production quality and bring this back to a developer's point of view. One of the coolest parts of my job specifically is that I get to work with Ethan, John, Joe and Russell on a regular basis. Through a variety of means, I get an idea that doesn't work for traditional publishing but works for AP, and I get to work on it and run it by the rest of the guys to see what they think. From there it gets outlined, developed, farmed out to writers, and so on -- the same deal as with any other book. There are some unique challenges and opportunities to alternative media, but there's a lot of the same workflow. It's also nice to be able to look at some submissions we get in and think of alternative ways to get that material out to the public. As a result, I have to be somewhat familiar with all of our game lines (and let me tell you, we put out a lot of books). Each line has subtle (and sometimes, not-so-subtle) differences, and I have to keep those in mind. It's a lot of shifting gears to go from working on the Scion Companion to an Innocents SAS to a proposal for an Exalted book. There's even been a few times where I've asked someone to repitch an idea that doesn't work for one game line into a pitch for another, because the flavor and feel might work better in that game. It all ties back to finding alternatives for a project.

So print-on-demand will be a part of offering those alternatives to you. It's still got some bugs to work out, but fans should definitely keep an eye out for upcoming products in that area. I hope you'll be surprised by what you find there in time.