I wrote about this earlier today for Time’s Techland blog (Look at me, crossing the streams of my writing gigs), but as I was doing so, I couldn’t stop thinking about the digital comics world: Multiple publishers and digital booksellers are facing a staggering seventeen class action lawsuits over the pricing of digital books, specifically something called “agency pricing,” which is essentially how digital comic prices are set.
Agency pricing is when publishers set the price of their digital releases, and that price point is used across whatever retailer sells said releases. It’s a system that’s been adopted by the big US publishing houses in response to fears that digital prices were so low that they were undercutting print prices and hurting the print retailers in doing so… Does any of this sound familiar yet?
What’s interesting to me is that, while the response from the digital book readers is sue the publishers and retailers for price fixing, the response from digital comic readers has been to… what, exactly? Gripe about paying $3.99 for Ultimate Comics: Ultimates but pay it anyway? Resort to piracy? I’m not sure what this says about comic readers as a mass audience – That we’re mild-mannered and likely to complain, perhaps – but it does make me wonder whether the results of the book publishing lawsuits could have an effect on the digital comics market and its pricing.
Of course, I’m still wondering when we’re going to work out digital comic pricing in general; I tend to think that Matt Fraction might have gotten it right with his attitude towards Casanova: Avaritia, releasing the digital version two weeks after print at a reduced price – $1.99 versus $4.99 in print – but missing the letter column. I could be wrong, of course. Is the same price as print for a day-and-date digital book a “fair” price? And if so, is the DC model of dropping a dollar after four weeks sensible, or has Marvel got it right by keeping things at full print price forever?
Price is likely to be the barrier to digital comics breaking through to a mainstream audience; the sooner this all gets worked out, the better. But who can really say what the correct price for a digital comic should be?
October 4th, 2011 at 2:56 pm
I don’t think there is any problem with charging price parity for Day and Date release, otherwise you cut the throats of retail (I’m not going to pay that, but i at least UNDERSTAND it), but catalog titles have GOT to be .99 ~ i’m just not going to pay more than that for a digital comic, especially something from the 80s/90s.
If they were .99 I’d probably buy the equivalent of a comic a day, it’s an impulse buy. At $1.99 i really think about it and usually don’t (I can’t recall the last time i bought something that wasn’t on the friday .99 sale from the Marvel app).
And if i’m not going to pay 3.99 for a print comic, i’m sure not going to for a digital comic. just sayin’.
and with Apple’s new Newstand app, let’s talk about subscriptions…
October 4th, 2011 at 3:40 pm
Any price, as long as it’s non-zero, is likely to be a barrier for digital comics for a while. Too many of us are collectors rather than readers. If I pay for something to own it, I don’t want it limited to a particular device or service, especially an ongoing series or even a mini that will be collected as a TPB later anyway.
I’ve enjoyed most of the digital comics I’ve read so far, but those have mostly been free (or nearly free) samplers for larger print purchases. I’m tempted by a few of the new DC titles, but I’m using the “new this week” announcements to get last month’s issues at the lower price. Even then, I’m not sure I’ll continue digitally over the long run.
October 4th, 2011 at 3:42 pm
Here’s where I think they’re screwing up with digital comics: cutting all the advertising from them. For crying out loud, sell digital advertising in the books, then charge $0.99 for each one! Then have the ads set up so that if you click on one, it takes you to a website for whatever offer there is, and get it recorded, so the advertiser knows how many hits they’re getting. It doesn’t even have to be the same advertisers, naturally — especially in the case of offering back issues! They could easily sell advertisers on line-wide placement for digital comics (whether it’s current or back issue), so that if you buy a digital copy of Justice League #1 in October, you’d get different ads than if you bought it in November (unless they wanted to set things up for the ads to update from month to month).
Another mistake I think they’re making is not offering (to my knowledge) subscriptions for a reduced price.
Like ThePants, I’m certainly not going to pay $3.99 for a digital comic — well, if they were to offer Essentials or Showcase Presents in digital format, I’d definitely consider that!
There’s no way you can convince me that the loss of advertising (profits) and the loss of print and shipping (expenses) don’t overbalance… They’re obviously making more money on digital books than print, right? Isn’t the usual price stores pay for print books 40% of cover? Well, that’s $1.20 or so for a $3.99 book, and Diamond makes its cut off of that $1.20, so let’s say that DC and Marvel make, oh, 80 cents per book in sales. If they offered digital books as I outlined above for 99 cents, that’s an extra 19 cents per books they’re making — a 25% increase in potential profit, and they’re already not spending money on print, storage, and shipping!
Let the digital books go out a month behind print — I’d have no problem waiting for that period of time to get digital for $3 cheaper than print.
Then the next thing they’d have to get around to doing is selling books that I actually want to pay money for, but that’s a whole ‘nother issue!
I do think that they should get the back catalog of trade paperbacks and the like in digital form, so long as the price is reasonable.
There is a way for them to get profits up on the monthly floppies in digital form, but I don’t see their current strategy as the way to do it! I mean, I’ll go to iTunes and buy an episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold for $0.99, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to check out one of the new 52 DC titles for $3.99 each! Consider it takes me 22 minutes to watch a B&B, but maybe 5 to read the digital comic? See how wrong that proportion is?
October 4th, 2011 at 6:23 pm
99 Cents for standard size and 1.49 for extended size. I will admit to not buying print comics anymore as 2.99 and 3.99 for ten minutes is too expensive.
At .99 I’d buy digital comics and a lot of them.
I fear this will never happen and cause piracy to run rampant.
October 4th, 2011 at 7:28 pm
Yeah, I think this is something that needs to be addressed properly. I mean, the medium is a print medium first, correct? So why not reward the actual purchasers of comics with the ability to read it first and have the digital copies go out two weeks later. The problem is piracy and the need for instant gratification.
I’ve been paying close attention to this issue as I’ve been prepping my first two creator-owned projects because I want to do right by myself…and I really want to do right by the consumer as well.
I think selling your book to your primary audience should cover costs and generate your profit. I think digital should just be “gravy” at this point…extra sales. Once the medium transforms to a wholly digital medium–then and only then should the price of a digital copy of a comic be 4 bucks. I think it’s a little outrageous to make someone pay for the ownership of a PDF or a CBZ file.
But what do I know…
October 4th, 2011 at 8:46 pm
My local comic shop sells new print books at a discount, so a cover price $2.99 book I pay $1.85 for. Why would I pay more for digital?
On the other hand, there are a lot of book I am interested in buying but I don’t want to have them clutter up the house. I would pay the $1.85 for them digital, but not print as digital I don’t have to worry about clutter. So, you could say the current pricing is keeping me from spending more…
Only time I really buy digital is when they are on sale for 99 cents.
October 5th, 2011 at 4:05 am
I have to disagree, Steve. I really don’t see there being any point in time that a single issue of a comic should be $4 in digital form. TV shows are $2.99 per episode, yet cost exponentially more to produce and take longer to consume.
Much as been made about the inelasticity of comic book pricing, but shrinking the price increases the number of people willing to pay to try and increases the number willing to stick around, if the product is good. To keep digital priced around $4 is to accept the current size of the audience is as big as it is ever going to get. If that’s the case, the industry should look into euthanasia.
October 5th, 2011 at 1:45 pm
Oh Kev, totally, man. That’s why I said “wholly digital”. That said: paper is expensive these days, creators still have to eat and get paid for their services and make enough money to live, right? I think that the proper thing to do would be to scale the prices down as the books get older and the run becomes longer. You want to read something that’s 5-10 years old? Hell, make them 25 cents a pop! Marvel and DC have already paid their light bill with the print versions of these books.
October 5th, 2011 at 3:46 pm
The issue around digital comic pricing is one that is dear to me. (what a surprise right? I built and run Graphicly after all!)
Here is the fundamental issue I have: Other than their lack of collectibility – digital comics are of EQUAL or perhaps MORE value than their paper equivalents. Why? Because they dont get lost, or burned or water logged. Because they dont reduce in quality over time.
But, for collectors, digital comics have zero value and therefore should be sold at as near zero as possible.
Yet, we deal with more than 5000 creators, many of them indies putting out their first book or close to their first books. So asking them to price books at $0.99, for them to make any money, knowing that print is beyond expensive, is just too bad.
Now, the suggestion of advertising is an interesting one. We have had a lot of brands approach us and ask to advertise in books, and at some point in the near(ish) future, we will probably have that as an option. But, its hard to sell advertising for a book that might sell 500. Easy if you are Marvel — hard if you are an indie publisher.
I’d love to make every book in our system free and support the cost in different ways (which, btw, we are working towards and should have some stuff around this idea sooner rather than later.)
In truth, its imperative that both creators and folks like Graphicly look at digital comics as a unique story telling platform. Create more value in the digital version (remember that DVDs sell more that have extras — for example) and the pricing will match. Mostly, make the experience of digital story telling about the VALUE not about the PRICE, and everyone wins.
Looking forward to continuing the conversation — always open to the email: micah@graphicly.com or phone call 720-248-8499 if you want to have a deeper, more personal discussion.
October 9th, 2011 at 8:12 pm
In gave up on monthly comics about three years ago because i got tired of dropping 20 bucks a week and having three to five books that i would read in an hour and be done with. three to five bucks is too much for print or for digital. i have in the past year picked up quite a bit of comics digitally. most of them in the buck or two buck price range. Atomic Robo. Dc books when Comixology has had 99 cent sales have been big for me. not to mention books like Chew which I picked up the trade after reading the first issue for free.
January 4th, 2012 at 2:09 pm
To actually usually are not cheated, make sure to see the testimonials available to you personally online. By reading through these, you’ll get an approximate thought on which to anticipate from your deals and also the site which is giving them. Once you’ve observed legit, use the actual discount coupons as well as bring them for the closest shop and obtain your chosen Passable Plans.