iFanboy Editorial: Digital Comics Are Not The Future.

Some good thoughts over at iFanboy regarding the digital comics landscape. While at first glance you may think that Brion is against the digital wave, you learn that it’s quite the opposite. Digital comics are here, but without the publishers jumping into the water, we won’t have much a comics industry to care about in the future.

I do take issue with a few points;

The lack of content is only one part of the problem. Let’s say that all the major publishers did go day-and-date digitally. All of the current digital solutions offer you the ability to buy your comics through their online store and read it with their proprietary software. You don’t physically own a copy of the book and they don’t make it easy to read wherever or whenever you want. You have to be logged in to their system in order to read the books you purchase and you cannot trade them with your friends. It is much more like renting a movie than buying one but it costs the same and I can’t bring it home.

The current system that I favor would be ComiXology’s. I purchase on iPad inside of their app and I can read it whenever I want inside that app locally. I can also read on the web using their viewer. The movie renting analogy, while seemingly accurate, may be an overselling of the shortfalls. You can read your purchased books whenever you want, wherever you are.

Brion then goes into two analogies. The first being one involving an actual store which involves the delay it get a new book:

Options A: Joe runs all over town to every comic book shop he can find. Most of the stores don’t have the latest issues of the titles he wants, but they do have some back-issues if he wants to catch up on his favorite character. Does he want to start with the Golden Age stuff or just jump in to the latest Big Event from three years ago? No, sorry we don’t have the hot new issue of that title yet but check back in a few months and maybe it will be here. One more thing, I’m sorry but you can’t take that out of the store, you’ll have to read it here.

Option B: Joe is walking down the street and trips over a big box full of all the latest comics. There is a note on the box that says “Take me”.

With the first one, the statement is that you cannot read, or do anything with the comic outside of our specific applications or viewers. I have no problems with reading a comic book inside of ComiXology’s apps. The viewing process is so fluid and well designed that it’s much more desirable than reading a scanned comic on the same iPad, using a third party app.

Which ties into his final point:

What the comic book industry needs to do is stop fighting against the inevitable change from print to digital. Learn from the history of other industries so that they can make the transition less painful for everyone involved. Look to the future as a possibility to expand your base instead of simply trying to hang on to something you will never be able to keep. There are generations of kids yet to be born who will possibly never own a printed comic book or walk into a comic book store but hopefully that won’t stop them from reading them.

Digital Comics are not the future, they are already here.

If the publishers fail to realize that the readers are their true customers and not the retailers, we won’t have much to read in the next 5 or 10 years. Hell, maybe even the next 3 years. Obviously we are still in the early stages of digital comics, but we can’t say that line for much longer.

When it comes to digital comics, publishers need to shit or get off the pot.

via: ballsmoke