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Devils Due has started publishing their comic books on the kindle with a selection of comic books that are the best sellers in some ways for Devils Due. There are approximately 40 titles up today for the company, but we are hoping to see more back issues and harder to find comic books. Of course I personally want to see Hack Slash on kindle, but I might have to wait for that for a bit due to the licensing issues with the title.
This is good news for a lot of people with kindles but I am still wondering about the transitory nature of e-books, and the value that consumers put on them. While I do understand that books are going to go in this direction, and lead to increased sales, and are generally good because they are a “fire and forget” process for the publisher, I still wonder about collectors. I also wonder about piracy and DRM, and how we are going to address those issues without the major screw-ups of the RIAA and MPAA in the process. I see the industry plunging in without working with the corner comic book market remaining intact. For some this will be good, for others, maybe not so much.
I see ebooks and ecomics putting pressure not just on collectors, but on how we do collectable comic books. While I think that what DDP (Devils Due Publishing) is awesome, what about the collector community? Those people who want to own physical property that can be resold rather than an electronic book that cannot be resold, traded, or generally loaned to your slow reading friend so that they can read it along the way. We miss something when we cannot share with our friends. Ebooks are a reality, I get that, but I think the collector community is going to go a different direction.
It is already almost impossible to get DDP titles, as the retailer and distributor channels clear of inventory, those titles that are for sale as a physical product are going to see a massive increase in prices. This is good for retailers, but not so good for DDP because they won’t see any of it. The ebooks generally leave people happy with what they purchased, but retailers are out of that side of the food chain. Rather we get a link back to the ComiXology store and a percentage of sales just like you would with Amazon, and we all know how well that worked for people in Illinois and New York. Affiliate sales are going to be problematic as states start increasing their demands for tax dollars.
Generally I do not abhor this new world, I think it is good for the general purchasing public, but I see a lot of backend issues that we have not solved yet. Affiliate sales and sales tax, how to manage people who need or want a physical copy, collectors who are going to want limited edition runs to buy, sell and trade. The comic book industry has not even begun to address these issues; rather we are plunging headlong in to the ecomic book process without taking a look at the entire food chain, and how to keep everyone alive and happy during the transition. We are making the same mistakes as the music industry and as the movie industry. It is sad to see history repeat itself.
You can already find a lot of the DDP titles on bittorrent sites (checked ISO Hunt, if it is there it is everywhere), and digital goods are easily pirated. While there might be kindle DRM, it was broken long ago, and will continue to be broken. No one in the comic book industry that I know of today has discussed piracy and how to manage it.
We move rapidly to our savior for publishers using ebooks, which is fine, but like many other industries we have not worked out how we are going to address the structural and economic issues that ecomics represent. I see a lot of local comic book stores closing as publishers go direct to retail in the ecomic market because affiliate sales just simply will not fill in the gap for retail sales. I see a lot more piracy without a statement from anyone on how they are going to deal with it. And I see an entire audience missed because we are not addressing the collector community. The comics industry hopefully will not botch this one like the RIAA and MPAA. There is room here for everyone, and the first question we need to ask is if we chose not to preserve the current system, what system do we replace it with?
