I own several books which are The Players Handbook, the Monster Manual, Dungeon Masters Guide and Volos Guide to Monsters. I was wondering if it was possible for me to use them without buying them seperately on the Marketplace her on DnDBeyond. It seems like a waste of money to me to buy something I already own a second time.

I'll appreciate any help!

A few important things to keep in mind when it comes to physical vs digital:

• D&D Beyond and Wizards of the Coast are two different companies. The money you paid for your physical books didn't reach D&D Beyond, and as such doesn't produce any revenue for them. Revenue they need to pay for the licenses, keep the servers on, pay their devs to develop tools and fix bugs etc. D&D Beyond needs an income stream to exist.
• You're not paying for something you already own; the content on D&D Beyond, while containing the same raw information, is a very different beast from your physical book. It's been formatted and indexed. Links have been added between sections and different elements separated out into their own listings. Each element of each book has been made compatible with the tools available on the site. If we were to compare this to another instance of physical vs digital book, your physical copy is like a copy of Lord of the Rings, while D&D Beyond would be like a kindle copy with built in hyperlinking to character information, text to speech so you can listen to it, bookmark syncing across devices. The books on D&D Beyond may be the same information, but they're not the same product

Now, onto actually helping you. There's four ways you can access the content in your physical books on D&D Beyond

• Obvious one, and most expensive; buy the books. You're aware of this, no further explanation needed
• Next, you can buy just the elements you need. A monster here, couple of spells there, a subclass and race to make your character
• Join a campaign that has content sharing turned on (requires a master tier subscription) with people who already own the books. This is potentially the cheapest and easiest, but requires you know people sharing the books
• Finally, you can use the homebrew tools to copy your content from your books into D&D Beyond completely for free. The obvious caveat is that this is time consuming (something that should highlight why the products cost money, the content entry team puts in a lot of work). The other thing is you can't publish the content for anyone to access, but you can share it with players in a campaign.

It's also important to note that a large chunk of what you own in those physical books already exists in the Basic Rules, which are available on D&D Beyond completely for free.

Thank you very much for your help!

To your 3rd solution: I seem to be in a campaign where this is turned on, as I can access the sourcebooks through the DnDBeyond app. (It says that its shared by a person in my campaign; i dont know who and i havent had the chance to ask yet). However, when I use this site on PC these sourcebooks dont show up.

Would you mind assisting me with that? I

'm new to DnDBeyond and I would greatly appreciate your help!

If the books are shared*, they should be accessible through the mega menu at the top of the page. Mouse over 'Sources' and then click any of the book titles and you should be able to read the compendium** version.

If you're wanting to use the content to make a character, the character must be made in the campaign that the content is being shared. You do this by going to the join campaign link and selecting the option to make a new character. You will then have access to all the shared content.

*It also requires the DM to have made the individual books available under content management. Compendium** access can be toggled on/off on a book by book basis by the DM

**Compendium refers to the book in an 'e-book like' format, with a contents page and chapters etc. The other half is the 'listings' which is the individual elements. It's the difference between Acid Splash in the Compendium and Acid Splash in the Listings. Compendium is for general book-like reading, listings is for quick reference and tools.

Thank you!

Hey, 

Im looking at getting into this, and debating to buy the hardcopy material (as I prefer to have a hardcopy) but obviously would like to be able to have it indexed etc.

Is there a way to buy D&D beyond hard copy and also access it online?

Got ya, thanks!