December 16, 2013

Digital Books

For those who don't know, Wargames Illustrated has gone digital (actually started last month, but I've had precious little free time of late)! I certainly have nothing against paper and I still enjoy flipping through my old magazines, but I currently have ZERO subscriptions of hard copy mags (now if I could only get my wife into the digital age of magazines). I am seriously running out of space to continue to add books and magazines to my shelves.

Before I had a tablet, I didn't know what I would use it for. Now my iPad is my near constant companion. At any given time I have hundreds of books and magazines at my finger tips and millions within reach of a quick download. Between Kindle and Nook Apps, the iPad Newsstand and PDFs stored on iBooks, I currently have the following:

Complete collections of Dan Abnett's Inquisitor and Gaunt's Ghost books, Edgar Rice Burrough's Barsoom series, Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series, Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe and Uhtred books, Fritz Leiber's Swords series, and the complete works of Robert E Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, Michael Moorcock, and J.R.R. Tolkien. There are also The Art of War, a dozen Osprey titles, and Michael McNally's The Battle of Aughrim 1691.  More and more titles become available for these formats every month.

I have tons of RPG books in PDF - every 1e AD&D book, module, and supplement, all of the ancient TSR box games like Boot Hill, Gamma World, Top Secret, Star Frontiers, and Marvel Super Heroes, other games like Call of Cthulhu, Villains and Vigilantes, Paranoia, and Universe, and few modern ones like The One Ring and Numenera. There are also a few wargames like Beneath the Lily Banners and Donnybrook that haven't been circulated as PDFs yet (we are looking into it - the files are ready to go)!

For magazines, I have issues 1-100 of The Dragon, 1-3 of Gygax (the new... err... old school RPG mag), the full collection White Dwarf since they went digital (maybe 13 or 14 issues), a few Battlegames PDFs, and two dozen old Wargames Illustrated PDF's that I most often find myself searching for through the stacks (there are some articles I read over and over). I have digital subscriptions to Bass Player, ImagineFX, Miniature Wargames, White Dwarf, and most recently Wargames Illustrated.

And that brings me back to Wargames Illustrated. Issue 315 has a six-page feature on Donnybrook written by Barry and me. There is a fairly detailed run through of the basics of the rules, the reason behind some of them, and a general overview of what else is included in the book. It is actually the first time I have been published in WI as an author, though I've had lots of photos published over the last few years. I got my digital copy this morning, but I will be buying TWO paper copies for my collection to go on the shelf...

2 comments:

  1. Very good article in the latest WI, loots of inspiration for the up-comming Donnybrook rules.

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  2. Ha! Great to see that someone else's hard drive is chock full of 80s RPGs. Damn those pdfs!

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