Some are more pie in the sky suggestions for rethinking digital comics from the ground up, and changing the way everything works. Some are very nitty gritty user interface things. Certainly, we’ve learned enough from those experiences to inform bigger changes in the future. Digital Comics in their current format have been around for more than a decade now. It’s blinded the publishers to opportunities and to new ideas. We don’t buy digital comics that tell full stories or full series or complete runs by specific creators - unless they happen to be broken down in the same way that the print editions are. We still buy comics as individual issues or as trades that collect those issues as singular books. Why are we still stuck with the mirror image of a comic shop, just with a bigger back issue bin? It’s limiting and it prevents all the potential and possibilities that a limitless digital store could bring to us. The way you buy comics, the way you find comics, the way you learn about comics, the way you collect and store comics. They take the final digital package created for the trade paperback and just export that to the digital comics format, as well.īut shouldn’t the digital comic be a different package? Do the same lessons of shelving at stores make sense for the virtual shelves of a digital bookshelf?ĭigital Comics Distribution/Retail should be a different experience from print retail. That includes formatting as well as pricing.Ĭombine that with a publisher workflow (dare I say “pipeline”?) that emphasizes efficiency over logic. They’re afraid to do anything differently that might cut into DM sales, no matter how much it harms digital comics or the potential to find new audiences for comics. The root of the problem, as always, is that Digital Comics are still made with protectionism towards the Direct Market foremost in the publishers’ minds. Until that day comes, the Comixology interface needs an update that I think could help comic readers, especially newer ones. The entire system needs a complete rethinking: Publishers need to reconsider how they sell comics digitally. We’re doing collected editions of comics wrong in the digital world.
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