Save the Comics Industry, Go Digital!
December 12, 2005
The comic book industry has been hurting for a lot of years. This is no surprise to anyone who has remotely followed comics at all over the last 10 years. Comic book shops continue to close. I think the closest one to me is now over 100 miles away.
Is this because people aren’t interested in superheroes?
I’d say a definitive no to that one. Just look at what’s been coming out of Hollywood in the last 5 years: Spider-Man (1 & 2), X-Men (1, 2 & 3), Daredevil, Sin City, Electra, Blade (1, 2, and 3), the Hulk, Batman Begins, The Fantastic Four, Superman Returns, and more! I’d be willing to guess the total revenue on these movies far exceeds how much the printed material is pulling in. Not to mention cartoon series and video games…
Is this because we read less?
I’m not sure where national or international reading numbers sit, but if anything we are reading differently. Blogs and web news as well as online published magazine’s are unlikely to be tracked, but all seem to be doing well.
So here’s my theory of how to fix comics.
Distribute online. Satisfy the long tail and distribute your comics just like Apple iTunes music store. Right now tons of comics are being illegally distributed online through BitTorrent. Just go to isohunt.com and search for any superhero you can think of). This shows a clear desire by the community to get their comics in this format.
Here’s how I would suggest making it a success:
- Take a chance and distribute your comics in CBR/CBZ format with no DRM. If you put DRM on it, people will break it. Those who want to steal comics will. Don’t invest the time and resources to put some crappy rights management that’ll inevitably be broken immediately upon release. So don’t bother, it’ll just slow you down and likely produce bad press. Think about the good press of being the first industry to trust your clients.
- Do not provide comics in a Flash format that is cumbersome to read. CBR.cc currently has an indie comic called “Six Gun” that they provide as Flash. This is cumbersome to read and I’d guess most wouldn’t bother. I want to click one button and have it flip the page. Simple. Marvel also used to do this with their various Ultimates titles, providing s few issues as Flash based digital comics. I forced my way through one, loved the story but hated the experience.
- Provide comics at a great price point digitally, I’d suggest $0.99. I’d happily grab up of comics that I don’t want to preserve long term at that price.
- Release less printed copies, so there is a reason to collect and save. Collectors want to feel like what they have is valuable. Fewer actual printed copies would make this true again.
- Provide online previews of the first 4 pages of every comic.
- Try some new ideas out in a cheap digital only format.
- Allow me to one click subscribe to a printed version. Once a reader gets hooked on the digital version, it’s likely they’ll want to go further, or collect the printed ones.
- Do fantastic cross title promotion. For example if I buy mostly Spider-Man, and he is making a guest appearance in X-Men, tell me about it when I login to my account. Or, if I buy New Avengers and you introduce The Sentry, tell me about the back issue Sentry mini series you have so I can get back info on the character. Or if I love everything Brian Michael Bendis ever wrote, tell me when he decides to write a 4 part Spider-Woman mini-series. Amazon has become famous for this, follow their lead here.
- Finally, provide your entire back issue library easily accessible. Some of these books have histories that extend back into the 60’s. How am I supposed to remember something that happened to a hero before I was born in a book that I can only read if I find an old copy on eBay? Of course I can read about it on a fan site, but how does the industry profit from this and continue to produce great titles?
OK, that’s my rant. Hopefully the industry smartens up and adopts this fantastic new medium to expand to the potential we all know it has. Put it this way, make comics easy enough to get digitally, that it would be ridiculous not to.
Tags: bittorrent, cbr, cbz, comic book industry, comic books, comics, digital publishing, DRM, ecommerce, long tail, marvel
Comments
13 Responses to “Save the Comics Industry, Go Digital!”
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two things
1. I dislike that there is no comment button at the bottom of your posts (If it is there, then ignore this, but I can’t see it, so you should take that into consideration). It is slightly bothersome to scroll back up to the top when I finished reading your post! ~which I have done~
2. Those are really excellent ideas. There are plenty of people who read online comics only, and who could actually be new subscribers to comic books if they were online. Getting some publicity thru established comics, like Penny-Arcade and PVP would be awesome.
Good ideas :)
you should get someone who actually makes decisions to read them!!
Interesting post. Is it possible to get notified of future updates from your blog?
Cheers,
Wayne
you can subscribe to my rss feed, and specifically on a per category basis if for instance you are only interested in comics stuff.
[...] Until I discovered the CBR and CBZ formats. These are simply zip or tar files that contain sequentially named JPG files, then are renamed either .cbr or .cbz with the last character indicating the originating format. Creation of this format is therefore trivial. Readers can also be created quite readily. I also love that there is no built-in DRM, but I’m sure the comics industry feels the opposite on that one. I gave my opinion on why they shouldn’t care back when I first started talking about the comic industry needing to go digital. [...]
Couldn’t agree with you more. I came back to reading comics after over a decade of ignoring them and it was downloading them in .cbr that did it.
Now I’m trying to decide which title I’ll subscirbe to.
Yeah, I went from subscribing to 2 titles, to having 5+ on a weekly pull list at the local comic shop…
Awesome, exact same experience and exact same ideas for the industry. Long live the .cbr comics and please implement them. We should try to get these thoughts to Marvel and DC, etc. Thanks.
These are some really great ideas. I got back into comics after almost 15 years not reading a single issue. Digital scans have allowed me to catch up, but I still buy dead tree versions of new books.
Somebody at Slave Labor must be listening to you:
http://store.slavelabor.com/
With or without DRM is an argument best left to lawyers, but frankly illegal duplication is a function of price.
Make the price attractive, make the package attractive and you will attract customers and create a revenue stream that wasn’t there before.
Also there are many readers like myself who live outside the US who find it imposible or prohibitively expensive to acquire back issues.
A complete run Avengers, or Justice league, in a well presented DVD case, with some additional editorial material (perhaps weblinks to interesting fan sites) would be very attractice at say U$20 or even U$30 even once it was translated to my local currency.
[...] Rights Management or DRM is a concept I have always opposed. In general I feel it is expensive and complicated for vendors to sustain, while relatively simple [...]
I too have recently started the .cbz thing and I’m enjoying the opportunity to catch up and not get stressed out about tie-ins and what not (particular with Civil War). So I particularly love that aspect your ideas.
Seriously, have you written an open letter to Wizard, DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, et al? This seriously needs to be considered.
Just to play devil’s advocate, isn’t it morally wrong to download .cbr files and other image types? No matter how many books you “preview” you still deprive artists and writers of some profit. And, if you really want to preview titles why don’t you flip through them at the store like everyone else? or read a few pages, that should be enough to determine if you want to own it or not.
I agree the movie industry is killing comics,in alot of ways it is saving the companies to to keep making the tales we would love to read.But the torrent downloads are the best thing to happen to comics.If it was not for those I would of never got back into collecting.I thing it is a great resource to fill in gaps of missing stories of comice you will have no luck finding.Even though I do have alot of files on .cbr I am going through alot of trouble to buy these comics again cause a true fan will do that.