What about you? As a consumer, and without being glibly unrealistic as to what companies and creators would be able to do, what would you buy and read right now if it were made available to you that way? For what are you a customer right this very minute? I think it might be worth to think about what we’d like from this material as more and more options as to how we might get it or gently pushed off of the table.
Let me tell you.
I want to get the latest American comics as soon or even earlier as they are in the shops in the US — here in Europe we’re usually a couple of days to a week behind at best, but I also want to be able to pick up complete runs of a creator or series, not to mention classic Bande Dessinee or Manga series. If I really needed, I would like to be able to download everything DC has ever published.
And I would prefer to be able to do all that through one site, rather than have to struggle with dozens of different distributors, who all want me to use their incompatible software. Finally, I would like my comics to be DRM free, in a format that I can use on every computer I own, whether it’s my android based mobile, my mini laptop using Linux, my Windows desktop or even the multimedia player that’s hooked up to my telly.
The good news is, I can do that. The bad news is, all the links above go to The Piratebay and neither the creators, nor the publishers would get a lousy dime for it if I did download any of this. (Which, just in case any Disney lawyers are reading, I would be legally entitled to do here, as Dutch copyright law has a provision for making copies for home use, permitted even if the source itself is illegal: can download, can’t upload.) Obviously, though good for me, not so good for the comics industry as a whole, nor for people already struggling to make a living out of their art. But it shows what the legitimate digital comics sellers need to do to make it worthwhile to buy them.
Get the stock online, make it easy to buy and price it in such a way that it becomes an impulse buy. I don’t want to see old Marvel or DC back issues for a buck: I want to see whole miniseries and story arcs for a buck. A good example of what I’m talking about is the Good Old Games site, which sells computer games, both new and classic. The older games are priced anywhere from three to ten bucks, right in that impulse buying range, but they’re not just shovelware: you get the extension packs as well, they’re tweaked to run on modern computers/operating systems and they’re DRM free: you download them, you can use them. It makes it literally easier for me to drop a couple of bucks to get a game there that I know I have in my shed on cd somewhere…
For comics, the format is already there: CBR/CBZ, basically just renamed rar and zip files, which can be read properly by a range of comics readers on almost every operating system under the sun, are easy and quick to download (ten to fifty megabyte per issue gets you decent quality) and means that you’re as a customer are not tied to one particular reseller/comics reader. Best of all, it’s DRM free so no worries about not being able to read your comics if the reseller ever vanishes.
Now I am fully aware that getting the various comics publishers to go DRM free is going to be difficult, as nobody in the comics industry has ever shown any capability to learn from examples outside it, but as the music, movie and finally even the bookm publishing industries have found out, DRM doesn’t work, only hacks off your customers and drives them towards piracy. Heck, the very fact that I can download everything DC has ever brought out (roughly a terabyte of comics), including dozens of titles they themselves can’t or won’t ever reprint (Fox and Crow or all those Bob Hope comics, or Big Town or…), should be proof positive that DRM don’t work in a medium where it’s so easy to exploit the analog hole: anybody with a scanner can route around your copy protection. Most of what’s available on the Piratebay was there long before most comics publishers even started to toy with the idea to go digital.
Worse, with DRM encrusted comics, the real winners might not even be the comics publishers, but the middlepersons selling them, as Charlie Stross explains has been happening in book publishing where Amazon has emerged as the 800 pound gorilla. You can easily see the same thing happening to digital comics as well, as it already might be.
To sum up: make it easy to get, make it cheap enough (at least for the overwhelming majority of back issue stock) to get it in the impulse buy range, make sure that it’s easier and nicer to use than going the pirated route would be. That’s what worked for iTunes and Netflix, that’s what can work for digital comics as well.
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