Over at CBR, Dark Horse’s Mike Richardson ‘fesses up and admits that, yes, Dark Horse’s digital comics are slightly cheaper than their print versions:

You are, in fact, pricing some digital comics lower than print: The digital versions of your $3.50 comics are priced at $2.99 on the day of release.

Yes. It didn’t dawn on us — the Apple store will only take [prices that end in] 99 cents, so some of the books got priced at $2.99, because the $3.99 price makes me flinch a little bit. If you take $3.50 and move it to $3.99, it’s not a very good experience. Some of the retailers are asking us please put them at the 3.99.

Will you?

It’s not our policy. I don’t like to charge more online than I do [for print copies].

Are people switching to digital to save that 51 cents?

It doesn’t seem to be happening. Print sales are steady and digital sales are growing.

Here’s my by-now-traditional question on these “Here’s what’s happening with our digital publishing plan!” interviews: Almost every single time, without fail, we see interviewees say “print sales are steady and digital sales are growing” or something similar; at what point is someone going to come out and say “We don’t think there’s as big a connection between the print and digital audiences are everyone expected, so we’re going to experiment and lower the digital price on certain books to see what happens?” Surely it’s only a matter of time, right…?

This entry was posted on Friday, January 6th, 2012 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Dark Horse. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.