CBR: Tilting at Windmills - Nov 17, 2011

[matthew_lane]

As it is, right now there are hundreds of millions of people world-wide who have a device they can use to buy and read digital comics in their pockets. Digital is already here - the issue now is how to make a business out of it.

i'm sorry mate, but that statement is akin to saying "well there are a lot of MacDonalds in America so there are no starving people in Africa.

Sure there could very well be hundreds of millions of people world wide who have a device they can use to buy/read digital comics... But how many of them are comic book collectors, teenagers & young kids who may be interested in reading comics?

Digital is a great way to make comics accesable to people in locations without comic retaliers, but as a way to reach the average man on the street its dreadful.

The idea is to make comics more accesable, not less.

If you look at the prevalence of piracy and even web comics it could be argued that the only reason digital is not the future of comics is because it's the present. I'm willing to bet that most of the series that Marvel has canceled recently had more digital than print readers. The problem is that most didn't pay for them.

As it is, right now there are hundreds of millions of people world-wide who have a device they can use to buy and read digital comics in their pockets. Digital is already here - the issue now is how to make a business out of it.

Which is like saying "Well i have this [insert name here] in my store, which people keep on stealing... So i'm sure it should sell well."

The reason pirated comics are so popular is that you can get literally everything that came out in a given week at the price of "free." Not only is it cost free, its also DRM free. Digital comics, the only medium in the world where the bootleg is better then the legitimaste version.

As for marvel cancelling series, the problem isn't "that most didn't pay for them," the problem is that with digital piracy, marvel gave them no reason to pay for them. Thats the thing with the interent: We can now check the quality of a book before we buy. If the quality is just not there, then the book doesn't get sold. An lets be honest, MArvel is well known for low quality books, especially mini-series.

[heroesmask]

Marvel is selling comics at $3.99 and yet they've still been having to lay people off. Don't tell me that a greater profit could be made if they just sold more comics at $2.99, because like it or not the sales figures show that $3.99 comics sell quite well. If Marvel wasn't making more of a profit, they'd drop the price of Avengers back to $2.99. But if they did that they would only gain a few hundred readers, not enough to justify losing the extra revenue from the $3.99 price.

If you're only willing to play 2.39 or 1.40 for a comic, then it's like you're insisting on living in 2002 or 1993. It's 2011 and the price for the small dwindling hobby to be profitable is 2.99 and 3.99. If those prices aren't feasible, it just goes to show that the industry itself is much less healthy than the digital utopians think it is. To reiterate: Marvel is selling comics at $3.99 and they're still having to cut their workforce.

Paper is NOT what's driving the cost of comics up. People like to think that the cost of paper is the reason for the high prices, but they're wrong. Heck, Marvel gives out a ton of free preview comics every month. They recently gave every LCS many complimentary copies of "Point One", which was a way oversized $6 comic. The comic didn't have a $6 price-point because of paper costs (they DOUBLED orders for free!), it had that high price-point because they had to pay the creators a decent wage. If you want cheaper comics, they'd have to be written and/or drawn by slave labor, and no one wants that.



LOTS of people predicted 15 years ago that digital was the future of music.

Music has no physicality to it. Reading has physicality. Studies have been done showing that people who read the same text in digital remember less of it than those who read it physically. The digital interface itself prevents people from engaging as deeply with the material. This is a fact and many scientific studies have proven it. Digital leads to "shallow" perception and lower (on average) reading comprehension.

That said, there are advantages for digital. It's just another option. It's great for archiving. I read digital comics sometimes when I'm too lazy to go to the store.

But this idea that digital is "the future" is an oversimplification. It's such a simple-minded notion that has zero nuance to it. Digital isn't the future; digital is ALREADY here. Digital has been with us for a while now. Since 2004 or so, anyone who wanted to could get digital copies of comics for free (illegally). Many people did that and still decided that for the comics they really wanted to engage with in a deeper way, it was better to read paper comics.

Really the flatness of the "digital is the future" way of thinking is very indicative of the minds of those whose brains are totally given to the digital medium. There is no depth to it, just a repeated meme, a slogan mouthed by the borg. "Digital is the future. Come be one of us. Kill your individuality. Lose the capacity for critical thought. Just go with the flow and give up all of your autonomy."

But many people seem willing to give up depth of experience in order to live on the "cutting edge". They are very insecure people who fear nothing more than the thought of being considered "old fashioned". It doesn't matter if some of the "old-fashioned" ways were more healthy for society and promoted deeper thought; some people still want to turn off their brains simply because doing so makes them feel trendy.

Yes, this was a gross oversimplication. Since this is a message board I didn't want to go on a diatribe of everything I meant. In general the world is moving more and more to digital away from physical printed media. We are seeing it with magazines, books, and music, and to some degree movies and TV. Comics is the next to go I believe. I say this as a person who will give up his physical printed comics when they pry them from my cold dead hands. But I realize that the future is coming.

[Jono11]

Couple of things.

1) Is it really fair to say that all the New 52 #1s had a fair shake at the readership? My gut reaction--which, to be sure, might be way off base--is that when you launch 52 new titles at once, some of them are going to get lost in the shuffle. But when you launch, say, three or four new ones at once, those launches are going to be more conspicuous.

2) As wacked-out as things sometimes seem at DC right now, Marvel really is starting to look like a company that doesn't care that much about its comics division. They print like five copies of their collected editions, they don't seem to really care that much about the collected edition market, and it seems like every week retailers have a fresh set of complaints about how they've been treated by the company. It's almost to the point where I have to start finding someone other than Joe Q to irrationally and unfairly blame for what's wrong with Marvel. And that's a strange world to be living in.

3) I've always thought that "digital copy" is basically just a cheap, no-cost way for entertainment companies to pretend like they're giving you more. I don't think I've ever known a single person to actually use the digital copy that seems to come with every DVD and Blu-Ray on the market these days, for example. If people want a digital copy, don't worry about it, Marvel. They'll pirate one.

4) Your "singles vs. albums" discussion raises another (perhaps tangential) question. Why does the comics industry appear to be gearing its sales back toward singles with the whole "Digital is the future!" canard, while the storytelling continues to be geared toward collected editions?

5) I just plain do not get the idea that there is such a significant community of "pro-digital" people. The superhero comics world is notoriously backward-thinking, and has been slowly eating itself alive due to its inability to accept narrative evolution, but somehow everyone is looking to evolve the delivery system, which is really the last thing anyone should be focused on? We can't move past the same old boring status quo for the X-Men, but we're all ready to abandon physical copies of comic books? You can't read an iPad in the bath, people. You can't put your digital collection on the bookshelf and admire it. When you have guests over, no one is going to absentmindedly notice your digital collection on the wall and ask to borrow All-Star Superman. Digital isn't going to save comics. Good comics are going to save comics, if comics are to be saved at all.

[Jono11]

I LOVE digital.

But this implementation that Marvel had with Avenging Spider-Man was lousy. The beauty of digital comics is that you can be reading it on your iPad within ~15 second of picking up your iPad. That includes the ordering, typing of passwords and download time. It's slick.

Is that beauty worth what is fast becoming an inevitable and complete cultural shift away from a tactile, personal, long-lasting relationship with art? For a significant period of time in college, I'm somewhat ashamed to say that I pirated a lot of comics, particularly back issues, as I tried to catch up on years spent away from the Big Two. I was virtually 100% digital, in that sense. I can tell you that I took virtually nothing substantial away from that reading experience. The act of reading those comics was as disposable, fleeting, and ethereal as the format itself. In the intervening years, I've ditched those old pirated files and replaced them with physical collected editions where possible. The issues that remain uncollected, I plan to buy in physical copy and bind them myself. As I go back through and read some of those stories now, it's like I'm reading them for the first time, because I'm physically interacting with them. The reading itself seems much less hurried, much more contemplative.

This Avenging Spider-Man deal required you to go to a special URL, input a code on your PC, then answer a bunch of dumb questions about where you bought the comic....oh yeah.....you had to log into Marvel.com. Then go get your iPad and see that the comic is there.

Ignoring my philosophical opposition to digital for a moment to commiserate with you...on top of what you bring up--which sounds arduous already--the deal makes you go all the way to a store to pay four dollars for something you could have gotten for a buck while sitting at home.

No thanks. Plus, I think it'd be just as fair for the digital copy to come with a code redeemable at any retailer for a free dead-tree copy.

I think that makes a lot more sense, both for the retailer and for the company. (Heck, for the whole industry.) By doing it that way, you potentially drive the consumer to the brick-and-mortar store, where he or she is much more likely to have something catch their eye that they hadn't thought about before. By way of example, when I read the newspaper online, I almost never see some other article, in passing, that I want to check out. I read what I came for and I'm gone. But when I read a physical newspaper, my eye is frequently drawn to articles I never would have noticed, because of their physical placement near something I was reading. I think the same thing might hold true for the difference in how a consumer responds to an online digital store vs. a brick-and-mortar comic shop.

Digital is the way things are going to go, it may still take 10-15 years but it will go that way. Look at the music industry as a barometer. Who would have thought 10 or 15 years ago that CD's would be almost obsolete?

And yet, in a very real sense, it's the etherality and emptiness of digital that has driven me and many others not only away from digital, but all the way back to vinyl. Like many of my generation, I embraced music piracy wholeheartedly, but somewhere along the way, I had a sudden, visceral, sharp reaction against it and switched to vinyl. I still use digital for portable and computer use, but for serious music enjoyment, my money goes to one format only, and that's vinyl.

Music has no physicality to it. Reading has physicality. Studies have been done showing that people who read the same text in digital remember less of it than those who read it physically. The digital interface itself prevents people from engaging as deeply with the material. This is a fact and many scientific studies have proven it. Digital leads to "shallow" perception and lower (on average) reading comprehension.

It certainly felt like it. I would argue that there is a similar dynamic--at least for me--with music. When I have a large vinyl record, with its large vinyl sleeve with cool cover art and liner notes, played on a big record player with a good-sized stereo, I think I'm more intellectually and emotionally invested in that listening experience than if I'm just halfheartedly listening to music in the background on an iPhone while I make dinner.

Really the flatness of the "digital is the future" way of thinking is very indicative of the minds of those whose brains are totally given to the digital medium. There is no depth to it, just a repeated meme, a slogan mouthed by the borg. "Digital is the future. Come be one of us. Kill your individuality. Lose the capacity for critical thought. Just go with the flow and give up all of your autonomy."

Darkseid Is. (I just read JLA Deluxe Vol. 2. Finished the second half of it on various bus rides around the city today.)

[momaw]

As it is, right now there are hundreds of millions of people world-wide who have a device they can use to buy and read digital comics in their pockets. Digital is already here - the issue now is how to make a business out of it.

Are you seriously positing that mobile phones are a viable means of reading comics?

[QCCBob]

The only device needed to read comics is EYES and everybody has them (allowing for the blind, obviously), so the whole 'digital increases accessabilty which WILL increase sales' concept is extremely flawed. If you can download digital, you can find a comic shop or order online. Make books for more people to read that people know about and actually want to read and the delivery system is meaningless.

[uthor]

What digital gives us in convenience (or lazyness if you are happy being non PC about it), it loses in the joy of collecting, in the camererardery & feeling of community that a message board just can't replicate.

I'll gladly give up the "joy" of collecting. No more bagging and boarding. No more longboxes. No more piles of unsorted comics on my selves. Huzzah!

My strategy as a buyer? I buy most of my comics from DCBS at 30-40% off. So a marvel 3.99 comic is actually 2.39. Now if I can sell that digital code for 0.99 my net comic cost for a 3.99 comic falls down to 1.40. Which is a very comfortable price point.

I'm thinking about buying my friends digital codes for the books of his that I borrow. I rear all his comics, but obviously don't have permanent access to them. By buying the codes off him, I'll get a digital copy for a dollar and he'll save a bit of cash for each book of his that I read. Seems win/win to me.

(30-40% off, you say. Hmm...)

I'm feeling burned on the whole digital revolution. Take movies for example. I have about 50 itunes movies redeemed from blu-ray copies. I don't have an ipad so they are pretty much useless from a portable sense but I live in hope that itunes will become available on other platforms. I would never pay the prices they want for the digital copies either. So I have this library that I can hopefully oneday use and now the studies (Warner I'm looking at you) are trying to change the rules and make digital copies a cloud only item that can only be streamed and has an expirable (is that a word?) license.

I fail to see how you're being "burned". Either you are purposefully buying these blu-rays for the digital, knowing that you can't play it, or you are buying the copies despite the digital, at which point it shouldn't matter if you can play it or not. The first case is no one's fault but your own (don't buy technology for unspecified future promises). The second is just getting mad and free bonus content.

Translate to comics. How many different types of services have they tried so far? How complex are they? I'm not confident I can buy comics digitally today (not that I have a device that makes the idea of digital comics appealing - I certainly ain't reading them on my bulky laptop) and start up a library that won't be incompatible in 2 years time with whatever way they change the delivery and drm model.

Yes, there's a lot of different services. That's a good thing. Now, in the new emerging market, it leads to evolution as people figure out what works and what doesn't. Later it will lead to better products for consumers. It's like complaining that Amazon has an mp3 store in addition to iTunes. You know what? The fact that Amazon came along is what forced Apple's hand to lessen price restrictions and offer DRM free files.

The digital revolution is not here for the good of consumers. It's here for the good of the providers. They don't want us owning copies that we can read/watch at any time. They want us moving to a licensing platform where we have no physical copy, were we have limited use rights, where they can collect a fee every time we read or require us to renew licenses to continue reading in the future.

It depends on the pricing. As long as loss of rights/control comes with a drop in price, I'm okay with that. I continue to use Netflix even though they can control which devices I can use and what the available library is. I'm okay with this as I only pay a couple bucks per movie I watch. If I wanted the full rights, I'd pay the $10-$15 for a DVD. Personally, for the restrictions, I think comics are too much, especially priced equal to physical copies. I'd pay $1 for DRMed files, $2 for DRM free files.

[uthor]

Is that beauty worth what is fast becoming an inevitable and complete cultural shift away from a tactile, personal, long-lasting relationship with art?

And there's a generation of children being raised right now who won't understand your attachment to paper and physical copies. They will grow up without this nostalgia and see nothing lost reading something on a screen. The same way you don't feel the loss of imagining a radio drama in your mind with the advent of television, or the loss of seeing actors on stage with the advent of movies, or the loss of hearing an oral tradition being spoken to you with the advent of books.

[Jono11]

Are you seriously positing that mobile phones are a viable means of reading comics?

Apparently some people watch movies on them. I can't imagine how it's enjoyable, but then I understand increasingly less about people's choices in this arena.

I'll gladly give up the "joy" of collecting. No more bagging and boarding. No more longboxes. No more piles of unsorted comics on my selves. Huzzah!

That was always your choice. I mean, this kind of implies that you didn't collect for any actual "investment" reason, so why did you put yourself through all of that? You could have bound them into volumes and put them on a bookshelf. I'm not trying to make a point, it just seems like you could have solved this problem years ago.

And there's a generation of children being raised right now who won't understand your attachment to paper and physical copies.

Had you read further, you might have seen that I'm not really talking about nostalgia. I jumped ship to digital right along with everyone else for several years. And somewhere along the way, in the last couple years, I realized I had completely lost touch with the art I believed I was enjoying.

They will grow up without this nostalgia and see nothing lost reading something on a screen.

And they'll grow up not playing outside and see nothing lost in all the time they spend playing on a video game console. That hardly makes them right. It makes them ignorant of something for reasons beyond their control.

The same way you don't feel the loss of imagining a radio drama in your mind with the advent of television, or the loss of seeing actors on stage with the advent of movies, or the loss of hearing an oral tradition being spoken to you with the advent of books.

1) I do wish there were more being done with radio as an art form. I wish there were bigger budgets for it. I think it's a lost art that, in rare instances, is done exceptionally well. I also roundly enjoy the theatre. You can't really experience, say, Les Miserables via a video or audio recording of the musical. There's absolutely no comparison to the actual experience of being there. Fortunately, no one seems to be too busy digitizing Broadway, so that experience is still possible without too much difficulty.

2) Just because I don't NOTICE the loss of something doesn't mean it isn't a loss! If you sneak into my house and steal, say, my collection of Elizabeth Bishop poems (to pick an item I don't use often), it's entirely possible that I would not notice its absence for months or even years. But it still isn't there, and I'm still not browsing through my book collection for something to read and finding it and taking it off the shelf and enjoying it. The item has been lost, whether or not I realize it. Same goes for the current and future generations of youth. Just because they don't realize that they're getting far less out of art than they would if they were experiencing it on a tactile level, that doesn't mean it isn't true. Just as all of the elements of the oral tradition that are lost to me are lost to me whether or not I am regularly made aware of the loss.

[matthew_lane]

And there's a generation of children being raised right now who won't understand your attachment to paper and physical copies. They will grow up without this nostalgia and see nothing lost reading something on a screen. The same way you don't feel the loss of imagining a radio drama in your mind with the advent of television, or the loss of seeing actors on stage with the advent of movies, or the loss of hearing an oral tradition being spoken to you with the advent of books.

Your right, in so much as if it goes completely digital, then the comic industry would die in a single generation, as the barrier to entry would be too high for new users. Thats the appeal of comics, its the fact that i can get one for a few dollars, without a $300 piece of hardware, active internet connection & credit card number involved.

[mistergoodman]

if it goes completely digital, then the comic industry would die in a single generation, as the barrier to entry would be too high for new users. Thats the appeal of comics, its the fact that i can get one for a few dollars, without a $300 piece of hardware, active internet connection & credit card number involved.

You could make the same complaint about the Internet itself. It requires an expensive piece of hardware, a monthly Internet connection you usually have to pay for, and you can't use cash to purchase digital content. And yet, it's become virtually ubiquitous. I expect that in time, tablets will become equally common, as they're a joy to use for a lot more than just comics.

Studies have been done showing that people who read the same text in digital remember less of it than those who read it physically. The digital interface itself prevents people from engaging as deeply with the material. This is a fact and many scientific studies have proven it. Digital leads to "shallow" perception and lower (on average) reading comprehension.

Not true, mates. Studies were done on reading on PCs, not tablets. But PCs are obviously inferior for reading- do you know anybody who read an entire ebook on a PC? In fact, the market for digital books, comics and magazines was quite small until the release of the Kindle and iPad. It's absurd to generalize the reading experience on tablets based on studies of PCs.

[Lemurion]

Your right, in so much as if it goes completely digital, then the comic industry would die in a single generation, as the barrier to entry would be too high for new users. Thats the appeal of comics, its the fact that i can get one for a few dollars, without a $300 piece of hardware, active internet connection & credit card number involved.

Used iphone: $25
iTunes acc't: free
iTunes store card: $15 almost anywhere.
Free Internet: McDonalds

Sure it's more than a single $3.00 comic but it's not the barrier to entry you seem to think it is.

My 9-yr-old daughter reads digital comics on my Droid which I don't use much since I left Verizon. She's getting a cheap tablet for Xmas.

With smartphones being everywhere - and most of them running ComiXology, there really isn't the barrier to entry you think there is. Parents can just hand down their old smartphone - and both the iPhone and Verizon's Androids can work just fine without service.

[deathcry]

To reiterate: Marvel is selling comics at $3.99 and they're still having to cut their workforce.

No they don't. Only retailers, brick-n-mortar or digital, sell books at $3.99.

Marvel sells books at 40 -60% of the cover price, depending on discounts to retailers. (And Diamond's cut comes out of that part.)

And really, how many studies on digital reading are there out there?

[Johnny Triangles]

Are you seriously positing that mobile phones are a viable means of reading comics?

I read comics on my mobile phone and some of my friends do too. With the right phone and software it's totally possible.

[Lemurion]

Are you seriously positing that mobile phones are a viable means of reading comics?

The number of comic reader apps in the various marketplaces, some costing as much as $15 is a clear indication that there's a segment of the market that reads comics on their phones.

My daughter's one of them - and I've been known to do it occasionally - though I prefer a bigger screen.

Still, it works to get casual readers interested - who can then move to better devices.