Two interesting articles on e-readers and comics
By Paul Biba
Newsarama has two recent articles on the interaction between e-readers and cartoons.
The first, Could Kindle Kill Comics?, by Vaneta Rogers: “[Comic books are] a business that is very low margin and very low print run, so if 10 percent of the readers migrate to an e-device, that is going to throw off the economics for 60 percent of the books that are published in this country, and that’s probably a low guess,” said John Cunningham, DC Comics VP, Advertising. “So it doesn’t have to become everybody in the room raising their hands having one to have that have a long-term impact on how the business goes.”
and the second, Can the iPhone Save Comic Books, also by Vaneta: As strange as that may sound to a generation who grew up reading paper comics, the next generation of comic book fans could be getting their fix by downloading motion comics on iTunes. And for small press publishers who are already struggling to compete, the distribution opportunity of the iPhone offers an enticing alternative to paper.
February 28th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
I downloaded the iPhone “HexeD” issue #1, since it was free. I had no problem reading it, though sometimes I did kind of miss the visual context of seeing the frame in relation to other frames.
But the American comic book distributor is actually kind of a latecomer. There was already lots of untranslated manga, including volumes of Shirow’s Appleseed, available on the store for 99 cents each.