If I had to guess, WotC is trying to prevent piracy. That's the only logical explanation. It doesn't work, as not offering PDFs increases piracy, but corpos have never been particularly good at understanding this.
Seeing some of WOTC's latest decisions regarding games does it surprise you in the lease bit that they dont understand this?
First off, I just wanted to say that I thought WotC
did offer digital-only purchases. I had never actually been interested in purchasing anything from them in recent years, so this fact eluded me. It's surprising to me that they don't, assuming it's true.
Anyway...
Every company wants to prevent piracy in some way, shape, or form. The proliferency of piracy, however, seems to come down both demand AND value. For example, I don't recall hearing about a huge pirate market around Harry Potter books, despite their undeniable popularity (merchandise is another matter, but that's mostly a result of China being IP thieves as usual).
In my experience, films and gaming books probably have the largest pirate market out there. The things these fields have in common is diminishing returns after the initial purchase. How many times can you watch the same movie before it gets boring? Often times, the purchase has an immediate depreciation. Back in the 3.x heyday, I must have purchased about 50 books, half of which are now sitting in a box on a shelf in my basement. There were books whose content I never even used in any game. Complete waste, right?
Now, don't get me wrong! I'm a staunch capitalist, and I understand the importance of having a consumer market in the economy, but people are also individuals, and they will assess purchases on an individual level. At 25-40 dollars a pop, some gaming books simply do not have that same commercial value to the consumer, even though the product is fairly priced considering production costs and overhead. So people like me, who HAD been loyal customers in the past, get to thinking that the company has already made enough money off them. It's a selfish mindset that I'm not ashamed to admit.
I'm not condoning theft, and I'm certainly not begrudging a company for wanting to make a profit. I'm just saying there are a number of factors involved. Inflation and shitty economy being one of them. So, yeah... not offering a cheaper digital-only copy of an expensive book is going to increase the rate of piracy.