As for myself, I bought the Captain America trades because of the torrents. I was buying She Hulk, 100 Bullets, Y the Last Man, Hellblazer, Lucifer, Birds of Prey and Daredevil trades in spite of having the downloaded files.

I guess the main effect the torrents had on me was that they stopped me from buying Civil War.

With torrents I can find almost anything and read stories the right way from the beginning and if I like it. I buy it. I doubt I would’ve been able to find all the back issue floppies of Criminal months after the first issue when I first heard about the series. And since I enjoyed it so much I bought the tpb on the first week of its release.

The publishers have to face facts, the comics book industry now operates on the honor system. Whether it wants to or not. Because that’s the only way mass media CAN work in the digital age.

So please, publishers, heed these words.

Trust your audience. Generally speaking, you can. Objectively speaking, you must.

What frankly makes the most sense is doing things exactly the way they’ve been done – comics sales are up 20%, and it’s foolish not to assume that pirated .cbr copies of current titles have been a factor in that, since they’ve changed the way a goodly number of comics fans enjoy the medium.

Like most everybody, I download comics for one of three reasons – because I plan to buy it when the collected edition comes out, but I’d like to be able to participate in discussion of the medium in real-time; because I want to see if a title is any good before investing any money in it; or because I don’t like it enough to buy it, but I’m curious about some aspect of it.

The first aspect, well, I used to buy it in single-issue format, and then buy the trade when it came out. Now I have more money and buy more trades, which works out well for the publishers because the trade’s a more profitable object in the long run, and which works out well for me because I get to enjoy the medium in the manner I like best. The second aspect is no different from browsing the title at the bookstore, except the initial browsing is done months before I make the purchase, which is also more fun because the re-read is better when it’s been a while since the initial one. The third one, who cares? The only titles I’ve downloaded but not bought are titles I haven’t liked very much, and it’s absurd for a business to expect to make any substantial amount of its money on a product the customer isn’t pleased with.

I have ten long boxes full of nothing but graphic novels, trade paperbacks, and hardcover collections. They’re in a storage unit in Texas right now, insured for $15,000 (£122.67), and that’s a hell of a larger financial contribution to the medium than I’d be making if I was trying to pick and choose what to keep up with piece-by-piece.

–d

The fact of the matter is, with regards to downloading, is that if we downloaded it, and didn’t buy it, there’s a pretty good chance we thought it was crap, and wouldn’t buy it anyway.