The rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web has changed a lot of the old ways of doing things. One of the more profound changes is the one occurring in any industry that relies on printed materials, books and magazines. Already there is so much information on the Web that newspapers and news magazines are losing subscribers. This forces those organizations to put their material on the Web and find new ways of making money, which in turns pulls more people into the Web and away from traditional media.

People are experimenting with electronic books. Either pads or electronic paper that can store one or several books and display them at the user's leisure. A user can download new books and reuse the pad. Another attempt in that direction is the Portable Document Format that Adobe pushes. Compared to books, PDF files can be searchable and can have hyperlinks to other documents or web sites.

One problem with electronic books is the danger of people distributing illegal copies easily. Most of the solutions that I've seen involve encrypting the file and having the reader only decrypt it once (or all the time, depending on how the book is sold). Of course, then you have to make it impossible, or at least hard to copy and paste or screen capture the text and distribute it that way.

Personally, I like the feel of hard copy. For news I don't mind reading it on the Web. But books I want to have the book on paper, bound and covered, not in electronic format. It just doesn't seem permanent if it's on a monitor. Some people would say "print it out and read it that way." That doesn't solve the problem as a laser printed book is far poorer than a hardbound book.

The gaming industry has also started going electronic in certain cases. There are online professional magazines, such as Pyramid, published by Steve Jackson Games. There are supplements in PDF format, which is what Hero Games has done for the last couple of years. There are web-enabled supplements, where there is extra material or utilities for a supplement, which is what Last Unicorn Games has done with their Star Trek and Dune products. In the realm of board games, there are many DTP games that you can buy and print out the map and counters yourself.

Maybe I'm too traditional, but I don't like any of these efforts. Far too often the difference between a real supplement or magazine and a fan produced product is that the real stuff is professionally printed. In going electronic, you start losing that distinction. Sure, official materials are better edited and usually have better material, but not always. In my mind, if it's not printed, it's not official.

Especially in gaming, I don't want computer copies of all the rulebooks and such. There's something to be said for having all the books, each independently searchable and easy to access. A computer screen is only so large, and typing in commands is not as easy (although if you're good enough, it can be as fast) as flipping a few pages.

The most annoying practice are Last Unicorn Games' Icon Links, the reason why I'm writing this entry. Their official line is that this gives them a chance to have extra material that didn't have room in the main supplement. And in some cases the extra material amounts to a whole 10-15 page adventure or other significant contribution. But a lot of the times it's an extra page or two of miscellaneous stuff that, if it couldn't be included in the supplement, could just as easily never have existed and it wouldn't be any loss.

What happens when you no longer have a page count to limit your writing output. Do we just get more crap, just because they had more stuff that didn't fit? Shouldn't the editing be better, to present a coherent whole without resorting to "see Appendix C on our web site" comments? In all fairness, LUG hasn't gone to that extreme. But I can see it getting out of hand, bringing the worst of both forms: higher costs for the printed material and some of it in a hard to deal with electronic format.