Graphicly to shut down their store front

Image by Kevin Menzie / Slice of Lime via CrunchBase

Honestly I love Graphicly, and over here we have been doing nothing but reading Graphicly Comic books and reviewing them for the past year. But they have decided to shut down their store front to focus only on publishing for the major players. This makes a lot of sense, but puts ComiXology firmly as the only store front standing in the market, which opens the door to a ComiXology monopoly on electronic comics for the masses. Here is the note from Micah that I got in e-mail this morning, uncut unedited. This is unbelievably sucky, but shows the Achilles heel in Digital comics and any digital item, sometimes companies go out of business and suddenly you lose or cannot add to your digital library any more.

We didn’t learn this from the music side of the house, so it looks like as the industry consolidates we will need to work out how we are going to manage this one. At least we get to keep our stuff, but the real question is for how long. E-mail below:

As you may have heard, today we made a very important announcement about the future of Graphicly and the direction we’re taking our business. Please take the time to read this as it outlines what changes are coming and how they affect you as a user of Graphicly.

Recently, we’ve expanded Graphicly’s service to help publishers get their titles in eBookstores such as Apple iBooks, Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook and many others. In doing so, we’ve realized that this not only helps the publisher but also helps you, the reader to find great new material and read it through the various devices like iPads and Android Tablets, as the creators of those devices intended.

With this expansion, we have decided to focus on this initiative and work to help more publishers get more titles into these eBookstores.

You will notice that we haven’t used the word “comics.” That’s because the Graphicly platform, as our name implies, is optimized for all graphic-based work, from children’s books to art books to magazines to school textbooks to picture books to, yes, comic books. Every day, a larger percentage of the content that runs through the platform is not comics.

Have we lost our love for comics? No. But we know that comics are just one way to tell great stories; there are many others, and all deserve to be seen.

So what does this mean for you, the Graphicly user? Here’s a list of the changes that will be occurring:

As of this week, we will be retiring the previously-released Graphicly Comics marketplace applications.  Our iPhone, iPad and Android applications, as well as a our Adobe AIR Desktop application will no longer be  available for download.

If you have purchased titles and use these apps, you will still be able to read your titles via the apps, but you simply will not be able to purchase titles through the apps anymore.

Your complete library of purchased titles will be still be, and always be, available to be purchased and read via our website at http://graphicly.com/store as well as through our Facebook Application (http://apps.facebook.com/graphicly/).

To say we’re excited about this step forward would be an understatement. If you own an iPad or an Amazon Kindle Fire, or Barnes and Noble Nook or any other device, you’ll be able to access a wider library of titles and enjoy them in an optimized way, getting the most out of your device.

If you’re interested in reading any of the great titles from the hundreds of publishers Graphicly distributes, you can browse the Graphicly store at http://graphicly.com/store

If you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to let us know – you can always get support from Graphicly here: https://getsatisfaction.com/graphicly/products/graphicly_web_beta

Thank you for your continued support  and we hope you enjoy the future of Graphicly.

All the best,

micah

——–

Micah Baldwin

CEO and Founder

Graphicly

Related articles

• Graphicly shutters iOS & Android comic book apps to focus on self-publishing service (venturebeat.com)
• Graphicly Opens Publishing Platform To Everyone, Looks Beyond Comics (techcrunch.com)
• How Graphicly is paving the way for self-published digital comic books (venturebeat.com)
• ComiXology Hits 50 Million Digital Comic Downloads (comicsalliance.com)
• ComiXology 3.0 comes to Android (graphicpolicy.com)