TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘comics’ Category

By Paul Biba

Marvel Comics has teamed with Panelfly to make their comics available on the iPhone. The Panelfly reader is free and one can buy the comics directly through the reader.

According to the Apple App Store the first issues of Ironman, Astonishing X Men, Amazing Spider-Man and Age of Apocalypse are available. They cost $0.99 each.

The app has bookmarking capabilities, and a page indexing feature and the comics do not have to be reformatted to show on the screen. The purchased books can be organized by title, publisher, author, artist and genre.

Thanks to TechCrunch for the link.

By Paul Biba

According to The Japan Times, Professor Kaichiro Morikawa and the Meiji University will open the Yoshihiro Yonezawa Memorial Library of Manga and Subcultures, which will house the 140,000-plus items of the late manga critic and subculture enthusiast’s private collection.

Yoshihiro Yonezawa was among the first manga critics in Japan, and he helped to legitimize the medium with his writings in the ’80s. Up until his death in 2006, he was a voracious collector, known to fill entire houses with books and manga, then abandon the space as storage and migrate to another house to repeat the process. This earned him a unique sort of repute, and friends would come to him to “donate” loads of manga and magazines they no longer wanted.

There are several Manga museums in Japan, but the Yonezawa collection is notable for the broad spectrum of its works – from rental manga, to ladies comics and pornographic manga for women, as well as manga sold from vending machines and miniature manga given away as prizes.

Being an ardent anime fan, I can’t wait for ereader technology to come to the point when manga, and comics in general, can be properly displayed. Thanks to Bookofjoe for the link.

By Paul Biba

This new reader can access a library of over 7,000 issues and includes entry into the Marvel Comic archives where you can see the first issues of Amazing Spider-Man, The X-Men, Incredible Hulk, Fantastic Four and others.

The PC based reader allows comics reading in three different modes: single page, two page and “smart panels”, a mode that allows one to zoom in on specific panels. The reader is available by subscription at $4.99/month. I’m going to take a look myself.

The full story is here. Thanks to ShelfAwareness for the link.

By Paul Biba

Well, we’re getting more and more different ways to read electronically. Now the PlayStation is getting into the act. Here’s part of a press release from Archie Comics. 

Back when I was a kid, my favorite character was Jughead.

Sony Computer Entertainment America recently announced the digital reader for PSP (PlayStation Portable), a new PlayStation Network service that will allow PSP owners to access a range of media on their PSP. The digital reader service will be launched with Digital Comics this December, putting PSP owners in control of a huge library of Digital Comics.

Archie Comics digital publishing partner iVerse Media will be adapting Archie Comics to fit this new digital medium. This is not a re-purposing of the material already available. These will be all new images prepared in Sony’s proprietary system. Instead of viewing comics frame by frame, the PSP will bring the full page to the users who will be able to move around the page using the PSP controller. When the system is up and running, you will be able to pick up Archie Comics at any Wi-Fi hotspot.
According to iVerse’s Michael Murphy, "We are working on reformatting the Archie Comics in our digital library into the new PSP format. We will have all the Archie titles in our library available at the PlayStation Store when the comic store is launched in December."

Thanks to ResourceShelf for the link.

By Chris Meadows

xkcd strikes again, with a hilarious strip that points out one of the failings of becoming too reliant on the Kindle…or does it?

(Click for the punchline.)

By Chris Meadows

Library humor webcomic “Unshelved” today offers some gentle ribbing of e-book enthusiasts. (Click for the punchline.)

Just another reason it is doubtful e-books will ever replace paper books, the same way paperbacks have never replaced hardcovers.

But, as the punchline shows, there’s no reason they can’t continue to exist side by side.

By Chris Meadows

Prose novels are not the only works to move toward e-book form. They may also not be the most successful. According to the New York Times, the popularity in Japan of cell phone e-manga has been growing by leaps and bounds, and may account for as much as 10% of the manga industry’s total income. (Business Week also looked at this phenomenon two years ago, when it was not yet as developed.)

The cell phone platform makes purchasing and payment convenient (as with cell phone games and ringtones in America, the purchase price is simply added to the customer’s phone bill). Another big selling point is the familiar benefit of title privacy:

“It’s a bit hard commenting publicly on this, but the most popular comics on the mobile are adult-oriented ones for women,” including love stories with sexually explicit content, [Yusuke Nakabayashi, a media consultant at Nomura Research Institute, a unit of Nomura Securities,] said. Translation: Women who do not want to be seen reading these titles in public places like the train helped create the market for manga on the cellphone, which accords them privacy in ways that magazines and books do not.

This is an interesting parallel to e-book sales in the west. As has been noted before, adult-content erotica titles have been among the biggest sellers at e-book stores—probably for precisely the same reason.

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By Paul Biba

In addition to the new digital release by comiXology, mentioned below, there was more digital news from the San Diego Comic-con. Publishers Weekly has a story on digital comics today. According to them Archie Comics has unveiled a new digital comics store and Genius Corp. has updated its comics app, Kamikaze.

According to PW:

The first full day of programming and events at this year’s San Diego Comic-con International was strangely subdued, despite being packed with fans. The biggest announcements focused on digital delivery of comics—including Google’s launch of a customizable theme page involving scores of cartoonists and publishers—the release of several new iPhone apps for comics and a variety of publishing deals, panels and launches at the show.

You can find the full article here.

By Paul Biba

This is from a news release by comiXology. Please leave a comment if you’ve tried the app:

With the Comics by comiXology app, comic book enthusiasts can not only read their comics in a format designed to preserve the comic book experience on an iPhone or iPod touch, but also locate and connect with local retailers to purchase the printed version of the titles. Through relationships with comic book retailers, Comics by comiXology will increase both digital and print sales of comics and deliver a powerful mobile marketing tool for comic book publishers and retailers.

Comics by comiXology offers a “guided view” that keeps the entire page of a comic intact, unlike other solutions where the page is cut into individual pictures the user browses like a photo application. Comics by comiXology is a reader app that contains all a user’s comics and offers its own digital comics store that supports multiple publishers.
Among the twenty publishers that have already signed up to deliver their titles through Comics by comiXology are many well-known industry icons including:

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By Paul Biba

Here’s an interesting press release from Harlequin. Thanks to Smart Bitches for the link.

Harlequin Comics are adaptations based on the publisher’s romance novels. The digital comics are currently distributed in Japan jointly by Harlequin and SoftBank Creative Corp, one of Japan’s leading digital content providers. Each month almost one million Harlequin digital comic files are downloaded making Harlequin digital comics among the most popular comic content downloaded by Japanese women. Harlequin Comics are also available print editions in Japan.

The digital comic titles sold in Japan are now translated into simplified Chinese characters and made available in Celsys’s ComicSurfing format for mobile digital distribution on a Wireless China mobile site. Wireless China is one of the largest mobile portal and E-channel providers in China. Launch titles include comics based on books by New York Times bestselling authors such as Debbie Macomber, Sharon Sala and Betty Neels.

Harlequin Comics are digitalized into a “frame-by-frame” format utilizing innovative new technology that allows the user to see each comic frame individually and then slide forward to the next frame. Each frame can be easily enlarged or shrunk via the touch screen.

By Chris Meadows

This is the second in my “Paleo E-books” series looking at Internet writing communities that were producing electronic literature well before “e-books” were first popularized in the late 1990s. In this entry, I will look at the Legion of Net.Heroes (and, to a lesser extent, rec.arts.comics.creative).

Like Superguy, the LNH is a shared universe centering on comic book superhero parody. However, perhaps owing to its different origin, the approach it takes is very different.

The Legion of Net.Heroes

The LNH had its genesis in April, 1992, in one of the free-wheeling discussions that took place on Usenet newsgroups (forums) at the height of its popularity. Usenet has become less active now that its place has largely been usurped by phpBBSes, blogs, and other forums, but back in the ‘90s it was the go-to place for on-line discussion of all kinds of topics—including comic books.

One day, a poster to the rec.arts.comics newsgroup corrected someone else’s spelling, declaring himself “Spelling Boy of the LSH” (Legion of Super-Heroes, a DC title about a hero team by that name). From that post, and the whimsy of other newsgroup regulars, a thread of general silliness was born as various posters created heroic (or villainous) identities patterned after themselves—members (or enemies) of a “Legion of Net.Heroes”.

Although that first thread was more random silliness than story, the seed had been planted, and it ended up germinating into a somewhat more serious system of Internet-based superhero stories—first on rec.arts.comics.misc, then moving to the newly-created alt.comics.lnh after r.a.c.m. posters complained about the story threads getting in the way of their serious discussions. Two years later, after spawning a number of separate LNH-related and non-LNH-related writing universes, the LNH and these universes would move to rec.arts.comics.creative where they continue to this day.

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By Chris Meadows

In the last few years, e-books have stopped being an early adopters’ toy and started attracting more general interest. People are starting to get the idea that perhaps reading off of screens—especially LCD or e-ink screens held in the palm of one’s hand—may not be so bad after all.

But for a small yet active number of people (mostly college students), “reading off the screen” has been going on for as long as twenty-two years. Before the term e-book was in common use, before the World Wide Web was widespread, college students with too much time on their hands were writing stories and sending them over the Internet through various mailing lists and other forums.

Though these forums were all different, what they had in common was the collaborative, shared-universe nature of the projects. As with the published Thieves’ World and Wild Cards projects, authors would write their own separate stories set in the same world, but their characters would occasionally meet with each other, or be affected by events that happened in others’ stories.

Some of these forums are still active; many of them are dead or mostly dead. What  they all have in common is that they have left behind copious archives of material. Some of it is all right, some of it is terrible, but a lot of it still stands up well even today.

In my next few columns, which I’ve decided to call “Paleo E-books,” I will look at some of these forums. I’m going to start with one of the oldest: The Superguy mailing list, which began in 1989 as an offshoot of the SFSTORY list started in 1987. That’s twenty-two years of history—and over twelve and one half million words of archives.

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By Paul Biba

There is quite some controversy going on in England right now about a proposed new law that may be so broad that even comics that are recognized as great literature may become illegal. Thanks to Nicolas Gary for the link. Here’s an excerpt from The Independent:

A coalition of graphic artists, publishers and MPs have condemned Government plans to introduce a new set of laws policing cartoons of children, arguing that the current broad wording of the legislation could lead to the banning of hundreds of mainstream comic books.

This week Parliament will discuss a new Bill which will make it a criminal offence to possess cartoons depicting certain forms of child abuse. If the Coroners and Justice Bill remains unaltered it will make it illegal to own any picture of children participating in sexual activities, or present whilst sexual activity took place. …

One of the books likely to fall foul of the new law is The Lost Girls by the graphic artist Alan Moore. The world renowned British writer is the creator of critically acclaimed comics such as Watchmen and V for Vendetta, and is regarded as one of the finest writers of his generation.

By Paul Biba

Thanks to Isaac Alexander for this listing of recent articles about reading comics on your mobile device. 

http://kindlereadersite.com/kindle-books/kindle-threatens-comic-book-business

http://comicbook.com/blog/2009/03/10/why-digital-comic-books-will-never-kill-print-comic-books/

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2009/03/slash-print-following-the-digital-evolution-3/

http://www.fiercemobilecontent.com/story/why-mobile-future-comic-strips/2009-03-05

http://www.newsarama.com/comics/090226-kindle-comic-books.html

http://www.newsarama.com/comics/090227-e-books-apple.html

By Chris Meadows

Randall Munroe of XKCD chimes in today with another ego-deflating comic strip on the subject of DRM. Hilarious as usual, and a potent reminder of how human nature can affect any such crusade.

Related: Prior TeleRead mentions of XKCD.

By Paul Biba

Comics are something that hasn’t made a big e-book splash, and understandably so. They require a fairly large screen and many require color. So it’s good to see that Bookeen is trying them out. From the Bookeen blog:

From now on you can find 5 eBooks demo from Foolstrip in your Cybook.
Foolstrip is a French comic�s publisher coming from the web and going imprint with some best seller. For this latest bundle, Foolstrip has worked directly to adapt their comics to the Cybook format.
This is just a beginning in exploring the comic�s e-reading performance.

I’m a big comic fan. One of my proudest possessions is a complete set of Walt Kelly’s Pogo series (need to re-read that some day). My current favorite is the beautifully drawn Girl Genius series. It’s available on line and if you don’t know it you should take a look, but the beautiful drawing and color makes hard copy versions essential.