GW claim that The Pirate Bay is infringing their IP.

[job]

I'm a paper man myself, but with the increase in tablets with sizable screens, I think that pdfs are the wave to ride. They certainly save a lot of space. Essentially you could have all your rules on your finger tips. (Granted you rarely need more then one or two books to play these games.)

While I agree with Tenorikuma about operational costs to set up pdf distribution, once you get it started publication costs will drop dramatically. Also you could update rules relatively quickly, drop expenses for rulebooks (one more start up cost players), and probably make more money by making rules fairly cheap to purchase (so many gamers own collections of rulebooks, and I think many more want to except for the expense). I bet if you could increase rulebook sales you would probably increase the enjoyment of games like fantasy and 40k. In my opinion one thing that hampers the enjoyment of these games is often the misunderstanding of other armies.

[me_in_japan]

I dunno. I definitely prefer paper, and I make it a rule to always own the codex for any army I play. In fact, im a sucker for hardback, limited edition type books, which is actually totally impractical for playing with. But, I also make a point of knowing the rules for all the armies. Not owning paper copies of all the rules doesn't get in the way of this. To be honest, speaking personally, the only way GW could convince me to (legally) download all their army books (collect them, as it were) would be to make them free. Otherwise I'll just get em from elsewhere. But, conversely, even if all the books were free to download, I'd still buy paper copies of the ones I play, because as people have said, they're easier to work with. At the very least, GW should make a rules-only version of codecii available to download for free, I reckon.

[AndrewGPaul]

I'm a paper man myself, but with the increase in tablets with sizable screens, I think that pdfs are the wave to ride. They certainly save a lot of space. Essentially you could have all your rules on your finger tips. (Granted you rarely need more then one or two books to play these games.)

PDF is a terrible format for on-screen viewing. Not surprising, as it's designed for producing documents for printing. Any of the various e-book formats are vastly superior, but due to the nature of most wargame rules available as downloads, no one uses them.