I would expect that a determined and suitably competent person would be able to create a copy that could be passed off as an original, although I wouldn't imagine the time needed to do so would be worth the financial return.

But an competent person with access to more than one copy, and any community with the interest to do so, would be able to weed out and combat such things. The papers available 30 years ago are not the same as the papers available today, and the method in which ink was laid down on paper 30 years ago is very different to the methods used to deposit ink on paper today. Those are cursory things that can be viewed through a loupe, before you start looking at comparing weights of books, accuracy in sizing, measuring distances between top line and bottom line of books of sheets of text, and delving into chemical compositions of inks.

On top of that, the PDF itself will not be dimensionally accurate. In the majority of scanners the light on the short axis is bent and pulled into the centre of the sensor and the sensor rolls across the page pulling in the image from the sides. As a result the width of the image is interpolated in software, as is its length, so you find that the width to height ratio is not a true representation of the scanned document but a close representation of one. So Mr. Wood B Crook would be minded to compensate for such things in his reimaging of document for printing if he were using a PDF as his source.

Now, I'm sure there are variations in weights of these books from one printing to the next, or one batch to the next from a single print run, and I imagine that could be tied directly to the final guillotining of the books. But a site where there are many copies in many hands for comparison should have little problem dealing with the prospect of forgeries in the future and labelling them as 'good modern copies', or whatever politically expedient phrase suits at the time.

Just my 2c, you understand.

If we are going to split out the print-on-demand subculture, almost every print-on-demand copy will be different. Almost all of them are one off print jobs. They will be differently aligned according to which PoD supplier does the actual printing, centred, bound and cut according to the individual who set up the machine for that print job, and influenced by whoever processed the files for printing, be that professionals outside of the PoD company who process the PDFs themselves, or the PoD supplier who processes the PDFs at their end.

Given the free availability of virtually everything ever natively published in PDF form, and maybe 70-80% of everything pre-PDF era having been scanned and distributed, I think we are entering an era where the actual quality of the product, there is little of collectable value in the PoD market, and a whole lot of 'noise' which on one hand is pulling money away from the collectables market (great if you are a buyer, no so much if you are a seller).

The market ahead, beyond the stuff that Acaeum members traditionally collect, is one of weeding out the real Kickstarter printings from all the aftermarket crap and copyright infringement bullshit, I think.

benjoshua wrote in Reprints:I personally like the reprints because I am more in the content camp.  

Me too, and that is why I buy PDFs. They are things you can read, but I don't imagine you can game with them.

benjoshua wrote in Reprints:
In a way, our hobby was full of "re-prints" even before DriveThruRPG.  There are three different printings of the original woodgrain box set.  There are multiple printings of the Players Handbook and Monster Manual and so on.  And this community has done an outstanding job of differentiating between them all, and will continue to do so.  I understand there's a difference between different printings and reprints, but from a content perspective, one could easily argue there's not a lot of difference.  Some people are interested in "the real thing" and others are just interested in the content.  There are people who want things in shrink, and those who want to read what's inside, and those who want both.  I personally like the reprints because I am more in the content camp.  

Nothing wrong with reprints, as long as it's stated that it IS a reprint.

Clearly that's the concern I [we] have as collectors...