Gareth says "Information wants to be free" and others point out that it is not unreasonable to pay the author of the scenario something for his time and effort in producing the material in the first place.
Neither opinion is completly wrong - If you were going to write the scenario anyway for your own group, then why are we paying for it? Of course, if we aren't prepared to write our own material, why shouldn't we pay someone else to do it?
I've certainly no serious moral objection to paying for quality material. Those who have could always submit their own epsiodes to Issaries for inclusion on the website! (1)
It seems strange to criticise a PDF for not being modifiable, when, by and large we are happy buying books, which are just as unmodifiable! (If you are going to print of a scenario to run away from your PC then you can scribble over the pages, just like you would with a pre-printed one. If you are running it from a PC then you can make additional notes in Text files which you can have open at the same time...). Yes, you might want to re-write bits of handouts to fit your campaign, or tweek provided PC character sheets to match your house rules - but again you would need to do that to photocopies if you had bought hardcopy.
On the other hand PDF does seem to manage scalability between US and UK page sizes without any difficulty, which is something that Word, and other WP programs don't manage, which means that (unless the author has cocked up the layout) I won't get charts, tables or NPC stats split across pages (or not fitting across the width of the page, which is a problem I get with RR's GLORWAR .RTF documents for instance). HTML is even worse when you try and print it out, often completely ignoring "bottom of page" margins and losing everything that extends beyond the right hand margin.
Also on the pro side, Acrobat Reader is freely available for both PC's and MAC's (and is often found on Product CD's or the freebies given away with magazines, so the potential length of download needn't be an issue). I don't have Word (or any other M$ Office) programs on my PC at home, and have found compatibility problems trying to open some at work.
So while PDF isn't necessarily perfect (and I was having difficulty trying to search some on line documentation yesterday with Acrobat running inside a browser), I do think it has advantages over the other alternatives for any document of any size
(1) a bit of an afterthought, and with apologies to Simon Bray, Dan Barker et al - but (particularly for an electronic product) I'd sooner have the text for free than pay for the text and illustrations.
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