Digital Horizons: Up With Digital Exclusives, Down With Prices, Down With Piracy

The New York Times announced this past week that Archie comics has reacquired the rights to the Red Circle superheroes, and that they'll be publishing new comics about these superheroes in digital format only. This surprised me since DC was pushing the Red Circle characters so recently, but I guess they weren't doing well, so might as well sell them back to Archie. The really interesting thing to me about this news is that Archie is going to be offering these digital comics via a subscription service. Part of me is intrigued by the idea of paying a monthly rate to have unlimited access to anything I want to read (a la Marvel's Digital Vault), but another part of me holds onto the idea of wanting to own the comics I read, not just rent them.

Meanwhile, Fleen, "the webcomics blog about webcomics," reports the results of scholar Mia Weisner's research into digital comics buying habits and interests. Fleen finds most notable, and I agree, Weisner's report that 90% of comics readers who are willing to buy digital comics are not willing to pay more than 60% of cover price for them. I apparently fall in the 2.4% minority of stupid people who are willing to pay full price. Not that I'm happy about it. I really think digital comics would do much better if the price point were lower. $0.99 per issue, same as an MP3, seems like the right point to me. But apparently I don't believe that strongly enough to refuse to pay more.

iFanboy has an interview with a former digital pirate who has given up pirating because, basically, the influx of legal digital comics made the whole thing uninteresting to him. It seems like that's basically what happened in the music industry--at first the industry was afraid to go digital because they didn't want to make piracy too easy, but piracy thrived in spite of them until the industry finally did go digital, making the piracy more or less redundant (not that it doesn't happen anymore, but my impression is that it happens much less than it did in the late nineties and early naughts). Of course, the music industry sells individual units at one buck a pop, not three or four bucks. Just saying.

Digital Horizons: Digital Comics Everywhere!

In digital comics news this week:

• Comixology came in at #2 of the week's top-grossing iPad apps, which I guess is pretty cool. Sounds like the Marvel and DC apps did pretty well too. 
• CBR spoke with Archie CEO Jon Goldwater about digital comics and he was all like, "Yeah, we were doing same-day digital before it was cool." Okay, not really, but that's what I would have said if I were him.
• CBR also spoke with Dark Horse CEO Mike Richardson and he was like, "We do digital comics too!" 
• Bluewater Comics is taking advantage of the timeliness digital publishing allows by publishing a digital comic about Muammar Gaddafi. Seems like a good way to make the most of the medium, if you ask me (and by reading this blog you have implicitly asked me).
• Richard Rys at the Philly Post says digital comics just aren't the same as feeling a paper comic between your fingers, and that the internet just isn't the same as a comic book shop. Meh. I went to library school with a lot of people who made more or less the same sentimental arguments against digital books. I wasn't convinced then and I'm still not convinced now. Technology changes. You get used to it. I like my Kindle, I like my Comixology.
• At first I thought this Blog@Newsarama post was going to be about artists doing page layouts with the iPad in mind, but it turns out that it's about Warren Ellis saying basically what I said in my review of Knight and Squire: Digital comics work best when comics are written with the single issue in mind, not the eventual trade collection. When I pay two or three (or four!) bucks to download a comic, I want to feel like I've gotten a complete experience, even if it's part of a greater whole. 
• This week IDW released a bunch of digital comics in Apple's iBooks store, which I guess is a pretty big deal. I figure the more venues digital comics are available in and the greater variety of digital comics available, the better--it's always good to have options.