I am a Dust Tactics player that plans to get into DW at some point. I have downloaded and read most of the PDF. The problem is that pdfs do not draw anyone else in.

I recently had the paper copy of Dystopian Wars rule book arrive as my son (age 6) loves naval warfare and cool ships so I plan to play that with him once the models arrive and I test drive the rules a few times. He simply loves and book and wants to get the ships and play. When he sees the iPad he wants to play an iPad game, not look at some pdf. He generally likes the expansion books for DT. For introducing the game to friends, a real rule book is also more attractive in trying to build a community of gamers.

Is it worth it to get the real books or just wait until I am actually playing warfare and decide from there? Any thoughts would be appreciated.

I am a fan of books. PDF's are a great, affordable option that many people like, but I just don't find the pleasure in reading them like I do a physical copy.

The best answer may be to buy both.

Buy the physical Dust Warfare Core Rule Book, get the Campaign Books on PDF. This lets you have the physical copy out during games and to let people browse while you are playing, while not weighing you down with the bulk of the Campaign Books.

I own both and I vote books, my tablet is slow to render the PDFs so looking things up takes forever but I do like to have PDFs as I can essentially keep them on my person 100% of the time.

I am a big fan of buying the physical copies of the books. Yes, they cost more and like Dakkon426 pointed out, flipping your PDF in the heat of the game will frustrate you and your opponent a lot. Especially Dust Warfare since the tables are different for each unit type that you are targetting.

I like the paper books because they're a tangible thing you can hold and show to people, although the PDFs are also useful in their own way. I think it comes down to personal preference. PDFs are slightly more convenient, while paper books are better at showing off the game and how awesome it is.

The great thing is that, like with most things in Dust, both are affordable. Even if you already have the paper book, dropping $10 (or £6 here in the UK) for the PDF isn't too much of a hardship, and the combined paper + PDF cost is still less than a codex from a certain other minis company.

On a slight tangent, I've seen some people express concerns about what happens when, say, 10 campaign books are out. Well, it's highly unlikely that a 300 AP army will contain units from so many different books. It's usually just two or three books (if that), which fits into a bag just fine. Having said that, a tablet or eReader with PDFs will definitely be lighter. Again, personal preference.

I'm betting that after a couple years of campaign books they'll release a revised rule book containing all of the "new" units not contained in the original core book, I beleive they're doing that with Tactics and a new boxed set this summer.