Online Comic Distribution

[Briareos]

The biggest difference between the music industry and the comic book industry is that there isn't a settled format for the product. In music it's pretty much settled on mp3 as the compression format. In comics people are still divided on how to do it. You have PDF's and cbr/cbz (which are just jpegs rar or zip compressed). Most online attempts to sell comics (that existed in normal comic format) look horrible (99% of the time the unauthorized scans look much better). I got a few things off of wowio and they were low resolution and not really worth it). The cbrs you can choose on pullbox online are a little better but they could still up the resolution. Music doesn't have that problem as there seems to be a certain standard that professional recordings get encoded to that everyone seems happy with.

[NatGertler]

In music it's pretty much settled on mp3 as the compression format.Except in the paid download world, where the most popular site primarily uses AAC, and many commercial sites use Windows Media. These are mostly to serve the publishers' needs rather than the consumers, of course.

[badMike]

I've been really impressed by ComicMix's comic reader since it debuted a few weeks ago:

http://www.comicmix.com/

Of course, you can't download their comics and their linking structure to back "issues" stinks, but if they could turn that reader into shareware, that would be a nice standard, I think.

[Steelhead]

These are mostly to serve the publishers' needs rather than the consumers, of course.You've got that right.

[bartl]

A) It's only black and white, and it's a little on the pricey side, but this is still a product worth watching: A paperback sized ebook reader ($350; the price would have to go down to about $100 to make it take off): Bookeen (http://www.bookeen.com)

B) One problem with the 25 cent online comic book is the fact that credit card companies typically charge new customers a 30 cent per transaction fee. Even a rock solid credit rating will mean that you have a 15 cent per transaction fee. You have to be a WalMart to get around that per transaction fee; until there is a way around it, you won't see much micropricing on the Internet.

[Steven Grant]

A) It's only black and white, and it's a little on the pricey side, but this is still a product worth watching: A paperback sized ebook reader ($350; the price would have to go down to about $100 to make it take off): Bookeen (http://www.bookeen.com)

Frankly, I think the price will have to come down considerably more to make any sort of impact... like about $230 more than the $100 you cite.


B) One problem with the 25 cent online comic book is the fact that credit card companies typically charge new customers a 30 cent per transaction fee. Even a rock solid credit rating will mean that you have a 15 cent per transaction fee. You have to be a WalMart to get around that per transaction fee; until there is a way around it, you won't see much micropricing on the Internet.

So economics dictate that the cheapest you can sell an online comic for is around 60 cents in order to make a quarter profit per "issue." Unless you sell on a subscription basis. That means, selling through PayPal, a 60 cent "issue" would net you, let's round down, roughly 28 cents per issue. Get 100,000 people - sounds like a lot in comics terms these days but it's an almost infinitesimal number compared to the total of Internet users so with a little elbow grease it wouldn't be out of the question - to buy and you're pulling in $28,000 per issue. Say three people working on an "issue" and selling that on a monthly basis, you're talking six figure yearly incomes for everyone if all profits are split evenly. I doubt that would happen tomorrow but it's not out of the realm of possibility.

- Grant

[MartinRedmond]

Online music for purchase is pretty crappy. You're better off ordering the cd and burning your own MP3s. For 20$ you get cd quality + MP3s that sound good.

If you buy a CD of iTunes, for near 20$ depending on the number of songs, you get crap mp3s that are encoded twice for maximum crapiness and no CD.


Until they sell you a whatever's the file name for a full perfect cd, buying MP3 is a rip off. And unless I'm wrong, the artists don't even get paid a percentage per song or as that changed?

As for comics, they're never gonna sell you decent online comics you can print for your own use either. It's just not gonna happen. Nevermind that you can scan and reprint by buying the comic anyway. It's a pointless file protection.

[NatGertler]

Ummm, no, if you buy an album from iTunes, it's generally about half of the $20 you cite. And if you want a CD, you can spend the 20 cents for a blank CD and burn one.
If you're buying just individual tracks, it's much cheaper than buying albums elsewhere for the tracks you want.
What the artists get paid depends on their deal with their label, who generally control the licensing.
Buying MP3s is not a rip-off if it gets you what you want at a price you're willing to pay for it.
And while I generally buy CDs myself (on the now-rare occasions when I buy music), I've had enough problems MP3ing various albums to know that it doesn't guarantee having MP3s which sound good.

[MartinRedmond]

I believe you need to clean your ears once in a while. They're obviously clogged if you can't tell how crappy iTunes songs sound.

[sgt pepper]

I hate to sound like a corporate stooge, but could Radiohead (or any band) ever have had that kind of online sales success if they hadn't been attached to a major label (that did promotions, etc.) for many years?

I can see Alan Moore or some other huge name having nice sales through an internet only independent comic, but that's only because Alan Moore spent decades building his popularity while working for major corporations.

Will youtube, myspace, and the like really be enough to handle the promotions for independent artists of the future, or how will this work?

[NatGertler]

Martin: responding to correction of your statements and addressing your logic with personal insults does not really shore up your position. Please consider acting more civilly in the future.

[bartl]

So economics dictate that the cheapest you can sell an online comic for is around 60 cents in order to make a quarter profit per "issue." Unless you sell on a subscription basis.
Or, a bunch of merchants get together, and create their own "credit accounts", where you can buy micropriced items from any of the merchants.

Or, and this looks like the way it's going to happen, Wal-Mart realizes that it has a corner on the micropricing market, and takes control of it.

[mattx110]

I really really really want traditional bookstores to survive a long long time. Don't kill them with the internet. A book is a unique experience, and reading it on a screen or printing it out ruins it, limits the paper available to what your printer can use, and is harder to settle in for the night with while you sip a nice cup of tea.

DOWN WITH ITUNES FOR COMICS!

(this does not extend to audiobooks, especially those of Jane Austen books or Shakespeare plays, that are enhanced amazingly by the actors, and generally if you're spending money on the usual high price of a quality audiobook, you've also read the book a few times in proper printed, binded format.

[Red Jack]

I really really really want traditional bookstores to survive a long long time. Don't kill them with the internet. A book is a unique experience, and reading it on a screen or printing it out ruins it, limits the paper available to what your printer can use, and is harder to settle in for the night with while you sip a nice cup of tea.

DOWN WITH ITUNES FOR COMICS!

(this does not extend to audiobooks, especially those of Jane Austen books or Shakespeare plays, that are enhanced amazingly by the actors, and generally if you're spending money on the usual high price of a quality audiobook, you've also read the book a few times in proper printed, binded format.

Bookstores aren't going anywhere. They may change somewhat and we may loose a lot of individual stores but they won't ever stop selling books, in person, to people.

Just as people haven't stopped going to the theatre (movies). Watching movies (tv and dvd). Or listening to the radio (the 'net).

People LIKE holding books just as much as they like actually GOING to the movies. It's more than just an information exchange.

You can relax.

Here. Have a cookie.

:)

[mattx110]

Bookstores aren't going anywhere. They may change somewhat and we may loose a lot of individual stores but they won't ever stop selling books, in person, to people.

Just as people haven't stopped going to the theatre (movies). Watching movies (tv and dvd). Or listening to the radio (the 'net).

People LIKE holding books just as much as they like actually GOING to the movies. It's more than just an information exchange.

You can relax.

Here. Have a cookie.

:)

Or buying CDs so they have a solid product instead of a digital one??? (<sarcastic). I'm not taking anything for granted anymore. This information age sucks in so many ways. How much paper and pens do you have to "use" before it would be the equivalent of purchasing photoshop, Illustrator, and a wacom tablet?

for someone who spends hours a day typing away on essays and reading internet articles, I am exceptionally ludditic in nature.

[Red Jack]

Or buying CDs so they have a solid product instead of a digital one??? (<sarcastic). I'm not taking anything for granted anymore. This information age sucks in so many ways. How much paper and pens do you have to "use" before it would be the equivalent of purchasing photoshop, Illustrator, and a wacom tablet?

for someone who spends hours a day typing away on essays and reading internet articles, I am exceptionally ludditic in nature.

Don't take my word for it. Look around.

Newer technologies always cause ripples, sometimes diminishing the dominance of the older. The theatre isn't precisely what it was before movies but it is still here and still vibrant and still loved and cried over by millions of people. Hell, there are plays that have movies in them now.

Video games have put a dent, a big dent in the sales of other entertainments but those others are all still going strong (despite the spurious whining of fat-pocketed entertainment execs).

New technology didn't remove the way music is created or presented, only added to the range of available choices. A CD is not a book. It's just a music holder. You don't touch it except to put it in the cradle. People will abandon CDs just as quickly as they did vinyl. So what? A book is just as much a visceral experience as it is an intellectual one.

People LIKE people. They like touching things and holding them and having them. We collect. We save. All of us.

I promise you. You don't have to worry. Not about that.

There are web tunes, web 'toons, web books, web 'zines, web art, web analogs for nearly everything, all made by people who now don't have to jump through anybody's hoop to get their work to the masses. It's like the advent of Movable Type on crack.

But there are also forms that are entirely unique to the web. Hyperfiction cannot be done in the Actual world, only the Virtual. Scott McCloud has a comic book on his site composed of drawings that fall into each other as the story progresses, this delivery of the story being just as integral as the art and the words.

By contrast, you can't walk through a virtual sculpture garden and have any clue what the real thing is like. Ballet on a computer screen? Please. No one would pay for that. Ya gotta BE there. (and I'm sure all those budding holographers out there are working on it)

The same is true for books.

The new doesn't invariably kill the old. It might force modification, usually it does, but it doesn't KILL. Not unless the old thing refuses to adapt at all.

It's too new. The true new forms haven't even been imagined yet. The old will certainly recede in the face of the new, that's inevitable. But, die out entirely? Never. Certainly not in our lifetimes.

[plapp]

With all respect due, I happen to disagree with your assertion that the future of comic books lie in the internet. This argument sounds as if it were cut from the same cloth as, "The real future of literature is in PDF files." I find the fundamental flaw here is that one treats comic books more like mindless pop-entertainment and less like art. Would you tell a sculptor to give up on clay because people are more interested in 3-D computer images? While this might be true, we need to question whether it ought to be. The question is not whether comics can work in the digital form, it's whether thay ought to be in the digital form. Does the industry need to restructure itself so creators have more freedom to create? Yes. Do distributors need to stop shoving fad genres (read: zombies) down our throats and telling us what is good and what is not? Absolutely. But we ought not change the physical product. This growing movement of e-comic advocates suffer from the same problem that comics-to-movies advocates suffer from: a lack of respect for the storied history of comic books and what they are artistically. It is my fear that this movement will destroy this classic piece of Americana. By all means, argue for change within the industry as it desperately needs it, but let comic books remain comic books.

[Perry Holley]

There's also DriveThruComics (http://comics.drivethrustuff.com/).

Overall, I'm glad the option is out there. There's a lot of comics that it would never be worthwhile for the publishers to put out a TPB or otherwise keep in print, but they can make it available electronically, make a little bit of money without having to front the investment of keeping said comic in print, and the fans can get a comic that might not otherwise be readily available.

[Lord Destiny]

.pdf comics are POOR. They are grainy. Overall, they are a miserable experience for me. The format should be completely abandoned when it comes to art. (Text is another matter.)

I wouldn't give a nickel for a .pdf comic.

.cbr/.cbz is the best I've seen. A quality scan is beautiful on my screen. Looks as good or better than the actual comic. This is the format, so far, that provides the best quality.

Unfortunately, this entire discussion of digital comics isn't about quality or consumer satisfaction. It is about control.

[Steven Grant]

You do realize .cbr and .cbz are just renamed .rar and .zip compressed folders of (usually) .jpgs, don't you? .cbr and .cbz aren't formats, they're compression standards. You can read them with any graphics viewer just by renaming the extensions respectively and extracting the picture files. (Free, great archive file tool: IzArc, from www.izarc.org.)

By the way, for viewing I strongly recommend FastStone Viewer, available free from www.faststone.org. Besides image viewing, it lets you easily manipulate batch files and has a considerable number of image manipulation and diagnostic tools. Really good program. (For PC anyway, don't know if there's a Mac version; same with IzArc.)

- Grant

[MartinRedmond]

Maybe so, but the CBR reader kicks PDF's ass with proper resizing so that it doesn't look like shit and it isn't a pain to navigate. Fastone looks pretty neat.

[Brandon Hanvey]

Pdfs can look good if done right.

It depends on the compression settings used when creating the file. When you make a pdf, it creates a jpg of the raster art. So the higher the compression the crappier the art. You get a smaller file which helps with downloading but at the cost of quality.

So you can create pdfs with better art, you just get a larger file. Plus if you convert the file from your publishing doc, it will keep the vector art crisp and clean no matter what compress setting you use unless you set it to convert to raster.

I'm not saying pdf is the best format in the world. It's just a viable format for some things.

[Squid Works]

You also want to realize that if the creator of the PDF doesn't know what they're doing, they may inadvertently create a PDF for screen viewing vs. printing or vise versa. Often, when I get print-rez PDF's, they look poor on my screen and vise versa. An ideal delivery vehicle might be something that looks good both ways, but I haven't found anything that is universally great.

[Brandon Hanvey]

My press quality pdfs almost always look good on screen.

But that may be due to the art files being 1200 DPI bitmaps.

[Steven Grant]

Maybe so, but the CBR reader kicks PDF's ass with proper resizing so that it doesn't look like shit and it isn't a pain to navigate. Fastone looks pretty neat.

I find pdf works fine for prose but it's bad for graphics as getting good graphics in pdf (it can happen) requires a lot of real estate, so most people settle for manageably-sized pdfs and bad graphics. Jpgs take up a hell of a lot less space for the quality, generally.

- Grant

[dancj]

So you can create pdfs with better art, you just get a larger file. Plus if you convert the file from your publishing doc, it will keep the vector art crisp and clean no matter what compress setting you use unless you set it to convert to raster.
Unfortunately the tool that most people use for reading PDFs is Adobe Acrobat reader which is a horrible tool to navigate around.

I find pdf works fine for prose but it's bad for graphics as getting good graphics in pdf (it can happen) requires a lot of real estate, so most people settle for manageably-sized pdfs and bad graphics. Jpgs take up a hell of a lot less space for the quality, generally.
PDFs can use any JPG, Gif or PNG (and probably others) formats internally for storing the images, so if the settings are sensible they shouldn't be noticably bigger than other formats for the same quality.

[SureLiesALot]

I think its funny that I stumbled upon this site by looking on Google for a way to open a .CBR file. Then the rules state that this is NOT the place to ask about .CBR files because they are illegal. But the same search also turned up pullboxonline which sells .CBR files so now i'm confused because Pullbox didn't appear to be any kind of pirate site to me.

[Brandon Hanvey]

I think its funny that I stumbled upon this site by looking on Google for a way to open a .CBR file. Then the rules state that this is NOT the place to ask about .CBR files because they are illegal. But the same search also turned up pullboxonline which sells .CBR files so now i'm confused because Pullbox didn't appear to be any kind of pirate site to me.

http://www.pullboxonline.com is a legal site.

The cbr format is just a format. It can be used for any purpose. The reason the Q&A FAQ states the below is because most of the time people are asking about cbr files that are illegal scans, and CBR (the site) does not have anything to do to with them.


The .cbr format of file is generally used in the illegal distribution of copyrighted material (usually scanned comic books) and is not supported by CBR in any way. Requests for this sort of information will be deleted and the user may be banned if requests continue.