Tom Spurgeon on whether comics publishers should look at piracy for online pointers:
Two huge on-line manga stories may clinch this CCI as the Year Of Digital Comics Announcements. Viz launched its Viz Manga site, I believe in conjunction with an anniversary party; a group of Japanese publishers discussed their JManga effort at a panel devoted to same. I have no idea if either of these ventures will be successful. Strangely, you can make a case either way based on the thriving on-line piracy of such material. On the one hand, piracy has shown that consumers will indeed process this material on-line; on the other hand, paying for such material on-line as is the case with at least the Viz effort is an entirely different process. Heck, you can even make the case that piracy will have little to do with either effort, and I bet those involved will even make that case so as to duck the issue entirely.
And they would be right. The only thing comic book piracy proves is that people are willing to read comics on the screen, which we knew anyway. Apart from that I don’t think piracy proves one or another that going digital will be succesful or not for any given comics publisher. Certainly much less so than e.g. music piracy showed the way for legal downloads. The piracy scene is fairly hardcore & packratty, relatively small compared to other forms of piracy and getting pirated comics requires a moderate bit of technological skill in that you have to be able to deal with bit torrents or Usenet and know how to deal with *.cbr/cbz files. Hard as it may seem, the people involved, pirates and downloaders both are genuine comics fans, probably buying comics as well as downloading them. It’s not clear that this is the kind of audience publishers should try to reach when it’s almost as limited as the core comics audience anyway.
What comics publishers should try to do is to reach the much bigger audience that quite likes comics, but not enough to bother going to comics shops. Comics need to be available easily, cheaply and of interest to mainstream audiences. Worrying about piracy doesn’t help.