Dimensions

So, as we're getting down to the final stages pre-release, I wanted to babble a little bit about a design decision.

Early on in the process, I decided that Melior Via products would all be digest sized. That means 5.5" x 8.5" aka, the size of a piece of letter paper folded in half. It's not a conventional size for RPG publishing, but it seems to be garnering support. I think that increasing support has good reason. I didn't make the decision lightly, so I thought it might be worth sharing the logic that went into it.

• We're an electronic publisher. That seems obvious, but it's worth pointing that fact out. Because we publish electronically, I think it's important that our books are as friendly as possible for digital media. There are very few electronic readers currently available that are well suited for displaying a letter-sized sheet of paper. Lots of people have posed workarounds for this. My solution was easier: Make the page smaller.
• Digest is booklet friendly. If you don't want to read your materials on a screen and you don't have an ereader, then digest is just easier to print out and make a booklet than letter sized pages. PDF readers can send a print job to the printer in booklet format so that a user can print the book, fold it in half, and staple it along the midline. Bam! Instant (short) book.
• Digest works with Widescreen. For those who are using a widescreen laptop or desktop display, most PDF readers enable the user to display two facing pages. With a digest sized book, both of those pages remain readable. 
• Digest works with POD. Finally, I'd like to keep our options open for eventually doing Print on Demand releases. And, at the end of the day, even allowing for an increased page count, it's much cheaper to print on digest sized pages than it is on letter sized pages. That means more affordable books for our customers.