by Aaron Tring
It was the hope of many tech enthusiasts that touchscreen tablets like the iPad would bring salvation for American comic books. Marvel Comics raced to have a Comixology-created digital comics app available for the iPad at launch, and DC Comics followed with their own app soon after. While neither publisher has discussed specific sales numbers, it is the lack of information and hype for digital comics that tells a very unfortunate story about the vitality of these comics apps. While I initially greeted these apps with reserved hopefulness, I was immediately presented with a number of fundamental errors concerning the way DC and Marvel were approaching digital books. After months of following the progressive development of their app stores, I’m sincerely sorry to report that the dream of a digitally-rejuvenated comics industry is no closer to reality.
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| Not even the world’s finest heroes could sell these comics… |
Misguided Pricing
This was the initial complaint by many who tried out Marvel and DC’s apps. The price of a single digital comic book simply cannot be $2. It makes no sense to have to pay $2 for a nearly 50-year-old issue of Fantastic Four with a big 12-cent price marker on the cover. The unfortunate reality is that a number of the collections available in these apps are actually cheaper to obtain in print form – how can this be? How is it possible that Marvel and DC could set such misguided price points for content which literally costs them nothing to produce? Moreover, in a digital economy where $2 can get you Angry Birds and a Talking Baby Hippo, what rational person would instead choose to spend that money on a retconned Superman comic that, at best, could provide maybe twenty minutes of reading entertainment?To be fair, I applaud DC’s frequent efforts to spotlight certain comics at temporary 99-cent price points, and I think both companies have been smart in providing the beginnings of certain story arcs for free. However, if they’re not willing to accept sub-$1 dollar price points, then they need to seriously consider content subscriptions. If consumers can’t justify the cost of owning a digital comic, then rent the comics to them in unlimited subscriptions, like Netflix does with our old TV shows. With an all-you-can-eat rental model, digital comics can be just as horrendously addictive as Netflix Instant Play.
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| Instant Play makes it impossible to get anything done. |
Don’t Sell Them In Custom Apps
Good pricing isn’t enough if people don’t know where to buy your digital comics. This is the problem with having custom Marvel and DC ‘apps’ – you have to be a pre-evangelized Marvel or DC fan to seek out and download these apps in order to purchase the comics. If the goal of digital comics is to reach new readers, this has to change. Since Apple’s iBooks store, Amazon’s Kindle store, and Barnes & Noble’s Nook store all sell full-color e-books, why aren’t Marvel and DC just selling their digital comics in these well-established book stores? Reading-minded consumers already know to check out the iBooks or Kindle store to buy reading material, so doesn’t it make more sense to sell comics in those stores, instead of expecting them to find and download the Marvel and DC Comics apps? If you look around on iBooks right now, you can find that there are a number of comic books available for purchase from other companies – including an excellent reprinting of some old Captain Marvel comics. This is where Batman: Hush and Ultimate Spider-Man should be located.No Incentive Against Print Comics
I’ve spoken with a number of comic fans who think the solution to all of this is for Marvel and DC to include a digital copy of the comic with a purchase of the printed copy. I actually don’t agree with this idea; sure, that’s what we see happening in DVD and Blu-ray sales, but I don’t actually know many people who are redeeming their digital copies. More often than not, they buy the Blu-ray telling themselves that they’re willing to pay extra to get the included digital copy, but never actually transfer it to their computers.
If DC and Marvel want digital comics to work, they have to be willing to let their digital books compete against their printed books. By that, I mean that they have to politely ignore the grumblings of comic book retailers and price digital comics far below their paper equivalents – and brand new issues have to be available digitally on the same day that they’re available in comic book shops. This is going to upset a lot of retailers, but spoiler alert – comics are going to continue in a death-spiral if we don’t remove these comic book stores from the equation. Buying music digitally did not become popular until it made sense for consumers to go digital; it took the arrival of an MP3 player far superior to a Discman and consumer-friendly digital album pricing that trumped most retail CD prices. Comics can make the same successful leap to digital distribution, but it will continue to be a failed experiment until Marvel and DC are willing to change their business models for digital content.reposted from Word’s Finest
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Interesting anecdote. A friend was gonna get me a christmas present of a years digital subscription to Marvel or DC, I don’t recall which. He didn’t because when he investigated, it was desktop only, and he knew (and was right!) that I wouldn’t sit at my desktop and read comic books.
Why not a years Digital subscription to the iPad app? I’d pay $50 to read what I want on my iPad. I assumed some exec looked at it like,
“Well if someone will pay $50 (or whatever amount) to read on the iPad they’ll read too much, way more than $50 worth of comics, let’s have them stick to paper and they’ll consume less for the same amount”
Except as we know it doesn’t work like that, LOL. So now I’m not reading any comics. I wanted to get back into comics, after having stopped years ago, the iPad is a nice reading device for things like comics. But I won’t pay as much or more than I would for the paper version. Sorry Marvel and DC.
Marvel has a annual digital subscription for only 60 bucks (yes can be viewed on iPads):
http://marvel.com/digital_comics/unlimited
Had a look because I have been waiting for the IPad subscription for a long time and I dont see any reference on the page that this subscription can be viewed on an IPad. In fact it specifically says that you need a computer that has flash on it which the ipad definitely doesn’t.
Acrtually, Marvel’s digital subscription cannot be viewed on the iPad (or iPhone).
This is because it uses Flash technology to render the comics in your web browser. Flash technology is not available on Apple devices.
If you want to view comics through such subscriptions and they use Flash (I believe DC do aswell), make sure the tablet you wish to read on supports Flash.
A Netflix-like idea makes perfect sense for comics, the more I think about it. They have a huge inventory, just like movies do. It’d entice people to read comics and there could also be the option of buying what you want to keep. I’d really go for this. There are plenty of comics I’d like to re-read from the days when I collected them plus many others I could never afford because they were priced for collectors. I could read, catch up, and also have the option to buy. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this model from what I can see. It’s Win for them — they get a *guaranteed floor* on the amount of money they can make in the course of a year — and Win for readers — who also get lower-priced single issues to buy.
Pretty much on target, but I’d make some observations. In fact, I was just thinking about this on the way to work. In particular the industry needs to learn from the pirates, and the fans. Just as the current legit equilibrium in music and video has ended up a lot closer to Napster and Pirate Bay than the pre-digital distribution models, in the same manner comics will end up in the same spot sooner than later.
a.) Universal viewers work. Perfect viewer works spectacularly well with CBRs. While Aldiko is fine it’s not well suited to navigating comics. My cheapo $200 Telepad 10.1″ android tablet is nearly perfect for comic and manga reading and a lot less annoying than comixology. Cut a deal w/ Perfect Viewer, use DRM if absolutely necessary, preferably use watermarking.
b.) Think Wikipedia vs. Britanica. Sites like Onemanga and Baka-Manga are very well cross-linked allowing an otaku to immediately find works by author, genre, artist and reviews. If DC and/or Marvel embedded one of the better wikis into a store with reasonably priced back issues. Stan Lee was hyperlinking decades before the internet. In each issue there would be notes on continuity both in series and cross series. If back issues are dirt cheap, fan boys are going to be plowing through those links like potato chips.
c.) Make digital durable. Fanboys like to collect, if a digital copy is ephemeral it wont be half as nice as a watermarked CBR or PDF. Fanboys want to able to go back to old issues, or show them to friends. When an old villian shows up, you’ll want to go back to the last issue he appeared or his origin story.
Not competing with print comics is the big thing.
Why would I use digital coimics when I can’t get new issues and they’re only a dollar or so cheaper?
I disagree only with the immediacy point.
A digital comic could go for $2.00 at release time, say a week after the print version is out. Then have it get progressively cheaper as time goes by.
Movie fans gripe that Netflix has just old stuff streamed but for those of us who find old stuff just as good as new, we’re not paying $10 for a movie we don’t even know if we’ll like. Keeping old content from us does NOT make us buy new content. The incentives are entirely similar.
I check old digests from the library but I’ve exhausted their supply. I won’t buy more because I have kids to send to college. I’d pay for their better books, (Invincible, Ultimate Spider-Man) if I got them a bit sooner than the library. I’d pay for the privilege. Comics fans with money to burn would pony up immediately at the top rate. Cheapskates kike me would read the same book months later for a quarter. If the stories are terrific, I’d want to see the next issue immediately and fork over 50 cents. If it’s REALLY compelling, I might, in a moment of weakness, pay the full price for the current issue.
Won’t happen until I can get the old version for two bits.
I’ll never know how good it is until it lands at the library and they won’t suck me in if the choice is Free versus $2.00 each.
(Hollywood would do well experimenting with a $5.00 half hour movie. too. The one size fits all nonsense is SO twentieth century and explains why outfits like Hulu will take a wrecking ball to the entertainment industry)
This is a joke, it is easier for us to scan the comics ourselves and read them on-line. All this proprietary crap just makes it more difficult to have access to the materials. The problem with the copyright laws today is they give to much to the publishers, copyright was never intended to be for more than the life of the creators. Let their stuff get the obscurity it deserves when people no longer read it or seek it out. Just a shame for hitorical purposes that we cannot have easy access to it.
Gerry