Digital Comic Museum
General Category => Comic Related Discussion => Topic started by: sandmountainslim on June 03, 2012, 07:31:57 AM
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With The New 52 I decided to give digital comics a shot and began buying the Superman Titles via Comixology which is the only place DC and Marvel allows to sell their series same day as print.
I overlooked the fact that I was paying a price which was equal to print without actually getting a product (U cannot download the comics but only read them on their server). For the first few months all went well and I was enjoying the hell out of Action Comics and then Comixology "upgraded" their site and their comic reader and all of a sudden I cannot read them anymore. One or two pages will load and from then on it locks up and no amount of refreshing will do the trick. I contacted their customer support which told me that because my ISP uses a proxy address (local phone company using AT&T's satellite internet) that I am GOING to have problems with how their reader is set up and there is nothing they can do about it. I told them that before their "upgrade" I was doing fine and happy to be a customer and I wished they would find a way to remedy the problem.....which they told me was impossible.
After thinking about this I now believe it is a BAD idea for the big publishers to only allow their books to be sold digitally by one company which can potentially isolate customers. I have also determined that if you cannot actually DOWNLOAD the comic to your own computer that it is a ripoff (since I now cannot read the back issues I previously purchased) so any money that I normally would have spent getting new comics from Comixology will now be going to downloading graphic novels, buying print collected editions and donating to to the DCM. Sorry to vent with this long winded post but Im feeling disenfranchised and aggravated as hell by this situation >:D
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Yeah, in many ways, Comixology became the new Diamond. No competition, and you're at their mercy when something goes wrong.
I didn't last too far into the DC reboot (mostly due to other things catching my attention), but in the last few days, I've been hearing a lot of people scream that something's very broken. Don't know what it's about, but you're apparently not alone, for what little that's worth.
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I refuse to give my money to buy any digital comics in a proprietary format which you can't download or read in your preferred reader. I buy quite a lot of digital comics, but I mostly get the from Drive-Thru (who sells them in non-DRM .pdf files) or Eyemelt (from Slave Labor Graphics who will sell them to you in non-DRM .cbz, .cbr or .pdf formats), among other various places. With Comixology you are essentially paying a high cost to rent comics, which is a huge ripoff and waste of money in my opinion. If I can't get comics from the big two since I don't use Comixology then so be it. I read very little of their recent drivel anyway.
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Ah well, hey, DC's loss is our gain then. We certainly need all the donations we can get!
Thanks again for yours SMS. :)
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The combination of this online archive and buying an iPad have given me a huge appreciation for digital comics. That said, as long as the major publishers are going to exclusively use Comixology as their digital distributor I will not be giving them any of my money. If I buy something, I want it. Comixology is not selling digital comics, the are renting them. If Comixology goes under (or just experiences a long term technical problem) you've lost what you've paid for.
The sad part about though is that I believe that, in the long term, consumers will voice their opinion of this type of process by not paying for it, which the industry will then use as proof that the market doesn't want digital comics (rather then that the market doesn't want poorly implemented digital comics).
Sigh...
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I seldom read a comic more than once anyway. So it is not a big problem for me. There are plenty of sites to get digital to save
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One of the few viable alternatives to Comixology is iVerse (http://iversemedia.com). Neither of the big two (DC & Marvel) publish through them, but a lot of the smaller folks do. Their cool feature is that (as publishers allow them to) they put comics out as PDF files that can be read by just about anyone rather that relying on a completely closed system like Comixology.
JD