New Prequel Book! Order of the Stick: Good Deeds Gone Unpunished (Book 1/2)

[The Aboleth]

I honestly don't know the answer to this, so I would contact Ookoodook customer service and ask them.

Or maybe APE Gamer will magically show up and tell us...

Thanks! I've sent a message to Ookoodook and eagerly await their reply.

Then again there might also be some business sense to it I don't know about, because I've never been in publishing before, and I literally have no idea what you go through getting all this done. Maybe you could illuminate me?

From the OP (bolded emphasis mine):

Q: Why are you delaying the PDFs until August? Why can't I download it today?
A: It's being delayed until the physical book is published so that some customers don't have to wait longer than other customers to read it. We really want the print edition to succeed, and if readers thought they could read the story three months earlier by buying the digital edition then they would be far more likely to do so. By holding the digital edition back to be published at the same time, we ensure that people buy the edition that they really want rather than rushing to get the one that comes out first.

This quote suggests to me that, business-wise, the print edition is the real money-maker. If the digital edition were released right away, it would presumably affect the print sales in a negative manner, which is an undesirable outcome for Rich's business. Also, as Rich stated earlier, the print pre-orders give him a rough estimate of how many books he needs to order printed; drastically over or under-shooting that number also negatively affects his business, and while estimating wrong is still something that could happen even if he goes by pre-order numbers it is at least far LESS likely to occur.

So, the PDFs are delayed in order to give the print edition an at least even chance of success against the digital edition.

I also assume (but have no basis for this) that delaying the PDFs also give Rich a chance to fix minor things that he might notice between now and August (or whenever he orders the physical books to be printed). If he releases the PDFs now, only to then notice later that a speech bubble is out of place (for example), he would then have a situation where the PDF and print versions have a minor difference between them. While he could, in theory, re-release an updated PDF to fix the mistake, the fact would remain that there would be a version of the PDF out in the ether that wouldn't be the same as the "correct" one, and I can imagine that'd be annoying (at best) for an artist.