As several earlier announcements explained in more detail, we can no longer afford the expense of publishing 240- to 256-page full-color RPG hardbacks. High printing and shipping costs combined with the weakness of the RPG market for everyone (not just SJ Games!) make that a money-losing proposition. The content needed for GURPS Low-Tech to be complete is too extensive to fit into the 144-page hardback that we can justify printing, so we're releasing it as a 144-page GURPS Low-Tech hardback plus three 32- to 40-page GURPS Low-Tech Companion PDFs. Total expense to the buyer will be comparable to the cost of a 256-page hardback in 2010, were we to try to publish one, but breaking it up into four bits lets us accommodate customers on tighter budgets and/or who don't want the whole cow.

Which is a longwinded way of saying that however much we love games and are gamers ourselves, SJ Games is still a business. We would ignore printing costs, market shrinkage, and customer budgets at our extreme peril.