I’ve argued before for a new delivery model for comics as necessary to keep the business alive in the long term.
Before I go any further discussing it, let’s tack on one more reason why going to a download-supporting sales model is a good move for comics companies: the electronic transfer of .cbr files is vastly more environmentally friendly than the continued printing of single issues (“floppies”). I’m not suggesting that .cbr files immediately replace floppies on a permanent, one hundred percent basis; however, I think that the gradual shift from floppies to digital is already underway, and it is healthier for comics companies to accommodate it and profit from it rather than fight it on the basis of supporting an outmoded method of sale which has only resulted in a gradually decreasing audience.
So, what should this model look like? Well, let’s make a few bullet points, first, about what people like about digital comics right now.
They are free. Now, obviously, a for-profit business can’t offer all of its product for free, but this tells me that the individual price of a downloadable comic (whether a definite, tagged price or a price derived from average use of a purchased e-collection) has to be low. Very low.
They should be .cbz or .cbr files with high-quality images. Some will argue that comics companies should pursue a more protectable format. This is stupid because there is ultimately no such thing; copy protections are more easily broken every day, and besides, the success of .cbr and .cbz files is not something that arose out of a vacuum; people tinkered with zipped collections of jpegs and PDF image collections before finally settling on .cbr and .cbz for their online comics reading.
This is a perfect example of the market determining its preference for delivery, and it is stupid to fuck with the market – especially when .cbr and .cbz files can so easily be encoded with ad pages and when the interface doesn’t easily lend itself to skipping the ads sight unseen. (Hell, some comics scanners already include the ad pages.)
They want to download the issues and possess them themselves. Or, more simply, Marvel’s “storing house” plan is, for the moment, a bad one. Maybe down the line consumers may become more receptive to the idea of “stored ownership,” of owning the right to consume an artistic work stored elsewhere. But right now it’s probably not great shakes.
They aren’t interested in locked material. No consumer ever is, and DRM-laced creative product only enhances the public desire for an unlocked, pirated version. This is why music companies are finally giving in and releasing unlocked mp3s.
They prefer individual issues. Although in a digital world there’s no need for arbitrary issue individualization (if I want one megafile of, say, Preacher, I can have one rather than individual issues), readers still prefer that the serial format continue to be recognized as such and distributed in such a manner. This is worth knowing because some people have suggested removing the monthly serial format altogether as part of the digital move, and I think this point argues otherwise.
Now, if we consider these points, what potential business models exist for online comics vending? (Marvel and DC will both, no doubt, try to have their own online store, regardless of the fact that this is stupid and we already know, thanks to the music industry, that it won’t work, so let’s ignore company-specific strategies and look at broader concepts.
The “dip a toe in” model. This is the most timid strategy I came up with beyond “do nothing and hope it works.”
Pick a low-selling title in which you have critical faith. Let’s say Blue Beetle.
Put the entire thing online in the following manner: Webcomic-style page layout (“one page per day/one page per click”). Your online version of the comic is black-and-white, rather than full colour, and it publishes one to three months behind the actual issue on the stands.
This is the most timid model because at heart, it uses the internet not as a delivery system but as a marketing tool; revenues will still primarily be derived from hard-copy sales of the comic (in floppies or trades), relying on fans to want to read the story “the moment it’s available” rather than in three months’ time, relying on fans to want to spend money to read the comic in full color, et cetera. In short, it’s a stopgap solution at best, designed to placate the internet-hungry crowd by doing as little as possible while still being able to honestly point at it and say “hey, internet!”
And it’s still better than doing nothing.
The “iTunes.” .cbr files available for download on a pay-per-issue basis. Simple. Straightforward. Easy to understand. Downloads of this sort should be relatively up-to-date; initially maybe a month behind printing schedule, tops. (The beauty of an online delivery system is that when the time is right, switching to simultaneous digital delivery is essentially instantaneous.)
The benefit of the system is simple: it’s a familiar model that already has some success. The downside is that its cost to the consumer ramps up very quickly (AKA “who the hell actually spends ten thousand dollars to fill up their iPod” syndrome) and it’s really a very poor model for profiting most highly off the enormous back catalogue possessed by most major publishers. Finally, it becomes difficult to balance pricing – companies tend to become enamoured of a single tier price (“99 cents an issue, cheap!”) regardless of whether that price is, you know, any good or not. (And digital comics should be way cheaper than 99 cents per issue.)
The “eMusic.” .cbr files available for download from a central site via a subscription model: ten dollars a month gets you, oh, let’s say thirty downloads. These are full-color, high quality downloads. Ads are permissible so long as they aren’t perniciously overexposed. Again, you may start out delivering digital issues on a delayed-action basis then shift forward as the market alters.
Many companies aren’t fans of this strategy because they always look at the model in terms of lost potential revenue. “Fifteen dollars for thirty downloads, that’s thirty-three cents an issue! If comic fans were buying those thirty issues in the store, they’d be spending over a hundred dollars on our books! A hundred is more profit than fifteen, even when you account for additional cost of production!”
The reason this argument is crap is because New Avengers sells one hundred thousand copies per month and Thunderbolts sells thirty thousand copies per month. Many of those New Avengers readers, reading a Marvel comic regularly as they are wont to do, are presumably at least willing to read an issue of Thunderbolts – they are not, however, willing to spend the three dollars plus to buy the copy of Thunderbolts. Thus, the revenue loss is essentially neutralized, with one key difference; under the eMusic scenario, the consumer may, after trying out an issue or two of Thunderbolts, go buy the trade paperback.
Since the vast majority of consumers under this model are the sort who would only purchase one or two books per month, what the remaining downloads per month amount to is nothing less than free advertising. Needless to say, this is the model I support, as should all right-thinking individuals.
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I think it makes a lot of sense, in the iTunes model, to tier pricing based on how new a title is. The first week of release, the price could be stacked pretty heavily (this only works in simultaneous release models, which are necessary to compete with pirate scans), while the back issue bins can be dirt cheap. This week’s new avengers might be a buck, or even two (though that’s pushing it), but last month’s are half that, and anything over X years in the past or from a dead series is dime-binned to iTunes. I think the flat-price structure is really counter-intuitive to a product like this, especially as people are used to paying different prices for comics based on intangible criteria anyway (like why angel: after the fall is a buck more than buffy), and everyone already kinda intuitively accepts that old comics, factoring out collectibility, are worth less than new comics.
I think it’s much more important to make release dates sync up than to keep a flat price. Thinking about it, honestly, you could almost get away for charging the full cover price for 0-day material. Your audience for this then becomes people who haven’t otherwise got access to a comic book store, but that’s a substantial audience, and it’s better than just leaving it offline all together.
I also think you have to give away huge chunks of the archives in order to get people interested in reading comics on the computer to begin with. Maybe titles like blue beetle or maybe classic stuff that is easily available in a variety of print formats (say, the Claremont/Byrne run on x-men), and keep the freebies changing on a rotating basis.
–d
Must you say ‘floppies’?
I am in awe of the fact that individual comics can still be found in stores. The only people who could possibly want these are the super hardcore comics geeks, because really, what casual reader is going to pick up a single issue of ANY series that’s most likely part 3 of 6, and even if it is the first issue in an arc, if they haven’t read what comes before, it might as well be right in the middle. The ONLY people who pick these up are the people who have certain comics that they always pick up, and face it, someone who says “I always pick up Amazing Spider-Man” is just as likely to say “I’m not buying another Amazing Spider-Man until this Brand New Day shit is over.” What kind of retarded company builds a business model around that?
I’m not sure exactly what the best model is for digital delivery, but personally I think the industry (and most specifically the “big two”) need to take a long hard look at what they sell and who they are. Who is the target audience? What are they trying to sell? How are they going to make money at it?
Are they magazine publishers? If so, then they need to take a look at how successful magazines have been making the transition to digital formats. Magazines make their money on advertising, and both DC and Marvel could have a very successful on-line presence with a decent advertising revenue stream if they were willing to take the webcomics model for their books – a page a day, on-line, with ads, followed up by a collection when there are enough pages to do it. They could even offer a subscription service where “premium” titles are behind a login and other titles are available for free (the “crack dealer” method of sales).
Are they book publishers? If so, then they should just be concentrating on selling collections. Complete a book, and sell it for digital download or print as desired. There’s an argument to be made here that serializing the publication in a webcomic form might help with sales of collections, but I’m not sure if that works or not. There might be a better argument for serializing in a webcomic format to gain some extra revenue from advertising, but whether the gain from advertising would offset the lost sales on collections is something I don’t know (and if you need it, then you’re really talking about the “serialized” magazine medium above anyway, and not really concentrating on “book publishing”).
Are they in the business of creating and shepherding licenses for other media and toy/clothing/lunchboxes/etc. sales? Then the individual comic books aren’t really needed except to the extent that they keep their licenses in the public eye and provide an easy “springboard” to hand to TV and Movie execs when they’re pitching a new movie or animated TV show. Again, a webcomic format with periodic collections would be a good model for this provided they can make enough money on advertising and collection sales to keep the operation “in the black” and self-sufficient.
Are they purveyors of nostalgia to a rapidly aging and shrinking audience of obsessive-compulsive collectors? And do they have no desire to reach the eyeballs of anyone other than the folks who already read what they’re publishing? If so, they don’t really need to be doing anything other than what they’re doing right now.
Regardless, I think the main thing that needs to happen is that the “big two” need to figure out why they publish comics. Or at least why their corporate masters let them continue to publish comics. Once they know THAT, then the right model for digital distribution will fall out somewhat naturally. (And of course the Direct Market retailers will take the brunt of the impact as digital becomes the cheaper medium for distribution. I’m not sure that anything can be done about that, unfortunately.)
Pretty much designed to appeal to the nerd audience though isn’t it MGK? The eight year olds that should be reading comics aren’t going to be downoadin pdfs off marvel.com are they? I’d just strip back the production costs (non glossy paper, limited colour) as much as possible so that individual issues (stand alone stories where possible, two – three parters max) are within the pocket money range of the children and then do quality trade paperback originals as well for the grown up market.
Maybe the biggest problem with comics is not the direct market, it’s not the price, it’s not even that kids aren’t reading them, maybe the problem is the general reluctance of people nowadays to just sit down and read. Newspaper sales have been getting poorer and poorer as well. You can hardly blame the price, I think my local paper is .50 for a non-Sunday issue. You can find them everywhere, no matter where you go. The smallest one horse town usually has it’s own newspaper. Yet they are still losing readers. I don’t think the internet is going to solve this problem.
itbox, eight-year-olds haven’t been the target audience for comics since the 1960s. It was more like 14-year-olds through the 1990s, and now it’s all over the map.
If a little kid wants to read a comic book, comics like the Marvel Age/Marvel Adventures line are perfect. They’re actually one of the few “floppies” that make sense, seeing as how they are really simplified and often self-contained stories. Anyone can easily pick one up and enjoy it. Anything other than those makes no sense at all.
“The eight year olds that should be reading comics aren’t going to be downoadin pdfs off marvel.com are they?” “itbox, eight-year-olds haven’t been the target audience for comics since the 1960s. It was more like 14-year-olds through the 1990s, and now it’s all over the map.”
Target audience or not, kids still read comics, maybe not as much as they read manga, but they do read them. They just don’t BUY them. Like MGK said, what kid is going to drop $3+ on a single issue? They aren’t, and they don’t. Kids are smart. They know about downloading. My 13 year olds were downloading more crap than I was. Main reason being they don’t have as much, if any, money and downloading was a way to get access to stuff when they couldn’t buy it. I used to loan out my trades to kids and they’d devour them. One kid read the Ultimate Spider-Man Collection (that first hardback with the first 5 trades or so together) three times over the course of a couple of weeks on top of another novel I loaned him and all his school work/band practice/etc. When I worked at the library the stuff most kids aged 10-15 checked out during the summer was manga and trades.
Digital is the way to go for singles. It’s just too damn expensive to pay as much as they ask for a single issue. I’d much rather pay a lower price, have it in digital as a backup, then buy the trade when it comes out- as I think a lot of people do now. I think people would be surprised how much sales go up for younger audiences too. In this economy $3 is a lot for a single issue of a comic. But you get 30 issues for $10, much like how the singles used to be in the “golden age” and you’ll see a lot more parents willing to pony up the money. Especially if you can view them on an iPod or whatever other MP3 device you may have. No, it’s not the same as having the issue in your hand, but i think it’s the next logical step, and I think we’d see sales in trades go up quite a bit as well.
Seems like nobody is mentioning the best part about digital delivery, which is that they open up DC and Marvel’s huge back catalogs for monetization, without any up-front price for print runs.
I’m surprised you said 99 cents is too expensive. It seems to be the magic price for things that get you about three to five minutes of enjoyment out of (a song, a chocolate bar, etc). For a no-ads comic book that you could buy on the day-of-release, I think that’d be pretty nice pricing.
With a bunch of ads, though (and I bet they’d probably do something stupid like try to make you watch a 30-second commercial as you download), I’d expect something cheaper.
The subscription model is probably the way to go, through, provided it’s subscribe-to-own and not subscribe-to-rent like with Napster or whatever. I’d want to be able to cancel my account and still keep the files.
There’s a hardware barrier to digital comics, too. As much as I like reading comic scans on my MacBook (don’t tell), I’d be way more likely to pay-to-download if there was a nice, portable cbr-reading device. Something like the iPhone but bigger, or Amazon’s Kindle but less ugly.
I think 99 cents is about the magic number, too. It’s got that whole less than a dollar (but not really with taxes) mystique, just enough for an impulse buy or two. With high quality scans and files, I’m not too sure if they could go lower and keep it viable. Bandwidth still costs money, doesn’t it?
Slightly off subject, but you know what might be an interesting experiment? Making an archive storyline collection of a big title (Spiderman or Batman would be good for their respective companies) available on DS or PSP UMD.
The ‘target audience’ (anywhere from 6 to 36) has large market penetration in this area already. Using existing stories means no additional investment other than the presentation (I would imagine some sort of panel by panel reader). As a good litmus test, a comic game already being released for one of these systems could have a sample included. Since both systems support WiFi, there could even be an option to log in for a poll to state if you would be willing to buy past comics in this format.
Regardless, I agree that the price model for floppies (ahhh, taking me back to my Apple II+ days) is utterly recockulous. Digitial download is most likely the best way for these companies to continue to profit, while continuing trades for those of us that like hard copy.
Also. the idea that 8 year olds don’t download comics… borderline at best. When I was 12 or 13 (back in the mid 80s) I was connecting to BBS systems with an accoustic modem on an Apple. PCs are a hell of a lot more common nowadays, and kids learn to use them younger every few years. If they don’t yet, it’s only from not knowing they’re available online. Having a site that caters to them (that parents can preload with credit, or using the 30 d/ls a month suggestion) would greatly open up a market that largely doesn’t exist.
One thing that needs to be addresses is the vehicle these digital comics will be read on. Lot’s of people are uncomfortable reading books or magazines on computer screens. And even if that aversion might be dying out, most screens are just too small and wrongly shaped for reading the classic comic book shape (especially laptops). With all respect to Jev above, the DS or PSP would be even worse in this regard.
What is needed is some kind of comic book Kindle, designed to be read from, the right shaped/size screen, and portable. If it could wireless download comics, as the Kindle can with books, well, extra triple bonus points.
It would need to be hecka cheaper than $349 methinks…and would be great if it were not solely dedicated to comics–if you could get books, magazines, newspaper articles, make it multi-purpose, it might be worth springing for. Or get yourself hooked on to a pre-exisiting service (can the Kindle do color? I don’t know…)
I think until we address the end vehicle, we’re just fighting a losing uphill battle here…
I think anyone who protests that people are uncomfortable reading books or magazines on computer screens is fighting an uphill battle against reality.
Seriously, do you have any conception of how widespread book and magazine filesharing is?
I’m extremely uncomfortable reading books on a computer screen. Looking at that amount of text for that long on a computer screen hurts my eyes. I’m much more comfortable reading a book. Added to that the sensual aspects of books, the feel of the pages, the look of the cover, the smell (etc etc) books are a clear winner for me.
Plus reading comics on Scans_Daily really demonstrates to me the limitations of the onscreen form. It’s great for watchmen like panels.
A B
C D
But less good when it comes to Splash pages or those panels that go down rather than across.
A D
B E
C F
Type thingies.
Brian – I agree that the screen limitations of DS and PSP are an issue, but the point isn’t so much to make that the platform, as to test the viability of the concept. You (I think) are more likely to sell a product for an existing platform, than to create a platform soley to sell to a niche market in the first place. If you establish the market first, you can develop a platform later to cater to that market.
However, perhaps a DVD archive would be a better plan. Something like this could be played on home DVD players, watched on a PC, or downloaded over XBOX Live or whatever the PS3 network is called. It could also be played on portable DVD players or ripped directly to PSP memory stick (although without an embedded viewer, the PSP would lack panel options and probably not be viable at full screen size).
I remember Marvel made something of an attempt at this in the 90s, except it was comics that you made yourself, as I recall. Although I think there were a few existing ones that came with it.
Andrew: I can only speak from the people I’ve talked to, which admittedly is not a scientific survey. But a large percentage don’t like it. That’s not a statement of preference on my part, or some Ludditism trying to prevent progress. I’m not fighting a battle against reality…I’m just telling you that what people are saying. And denying that a lot of people dislike reading off the computer is the uphill battle against reality, because until that’s addressed, it’s going to be tough to get any widespread solution successfully implemented. And any system that only addresses the ones who are already comfortable with filesharing is doomed to failure (at least, until all the grups die in the robot holocaust).
As to how widespread filesharing is, no, I have no conception. Do you? How many books have even 10% of their total readership through file-sharing?
Jev: Agreed in part…but the iPod and the Kindle are examples of new platforms that solely sold to niche markets, and look what happened there. If big corporate giants like Marvel and DC can find a tech partner, are willing to eat some of the devices’ cost until sales/economies of scale kick in, and most importantly find a way to make it hip and cool and useful, it’s possible (although I’ll conceed not probable). That’s why linking up with something pre-existing might be the way.
Just watch, though…those Marvel/DC chowderheads would come up with competing, completely non-compatible systems…
Brian – agreed the ‘big two’ would probably do something stupid like that, which is stupid since they could only benefit from sharing the platform. It would ease the strain on both if they did a joint financing of some sort – which they could recoup in part by licensing to smaller publishers.
The iPod is a prime example of what I am talking about, and what Apple excells at – taking existing technology (portable MP3 players, cell phones, computers) and making massive improvements on them to sell to a tech-savvy audience. Honestly, we’d probably see an Apple dominated PC market if they weren’t so determined to eviscerate themselves with the move to Mac, combined with proprietary architecture. There were easily years or portable music players (my creative labs MP3 player predates iPods by years, and it was 2nd or 3rd gen) before Apple revolutionized the field w/ the iPod.
We have the start of this now, people torrenting image files on the PC isn’t much different then people sharing .wav files of music. The shift to a better and standardized format (from .wav to .mp3 to continue the analogy) has already taken place. All we really need is for them to step up and show that the market is viable for SELLING these files, and someone will invest on their own to make a portable player… and no doubt people will refine it once they see the profit in making better readers. All the better if it incorporates video and music playback as well.
I could see Apple making something about the size of the large CD wallets (the ones with 2 cds on either side of a ‘page’), that leverages existing iPod tech to play videos as well as an excellent text / comic viewer. There just needs to be an expanded NEED for it.
Another thing about reading online, if I have to zoom more than once to read the text (and I have 20:20 vision , or as near as dammit according to my last eye exam) I lose interest.
I agree that the current ebook readers, while nice, can’t really do current comics justice due to their color limitations (the Kindle only has black, white, and two shades of gray, and I believe similar ebook readers don’t go higher than 16 shades of gray). However, Marvel and DC could still release digital equivalents of their Essential and Showcase volumes for ebook readers, as they’re two-tone black and white already. Screen size might be a problem, although digest-sized comics have worked fine in the past, and, barring that, a zoom feature shouldn’t be too unwieldy.
“Seems like nobody is mentioning the best part about digital delivery, which is that they open up DC and Marvel’s huge back catalogs for monetization, without any up-front price for print runs.”
I’ve been saying for a while that Marvel and DC should offer print-on-demand custom ‘Essentials’ volumes. The customer would go online, pick a bunch of comics, click a button, and a week or two later their ‘Essential MODOK’ would show up in their mailbox.
A similar service would work for electronic viewing – give customers the ability to bring up all the appearances of a character and buy/download them.
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i’m with you MGK, i feel exactly the same way about the industry. unfortunately i can’t see any company doing anything bold enough because they’re too big. an independent publisher can do what they want, but the ceo’s at marvel and dc work in teams. that kind of hive-mind isn’t supposed to get things done, it’s supposed to keep things straight. ie, “if the books are still selling, let’s not rock the boat”
whatever they do i don’t care. i’ll continue downloading and buying the better stuff in trades. i’ve spent over 1000 dollars on trades this year alone where two years ago i wasn’t buying anything. downloading comics for free got me loving comics again and now i’m bleeding money.