In light of the overwhelming demand for Marvel’s #1 freebie program – and ComiXology’s apparent inability to remain active during said demand – David Uzumeri considers the problems inherent with the ComiXology model as is:

[I]f Comixology books were downloadable in any form other than as proprietary data on their proprietary applications (iOS/Android), people could keep their local copies and not be locked out of reading books they’ve paid for. Whatever lost sales are prevented from this digital rights management can’t be worth the loss in customer confidence that accompanies what is, essentially, a contract breach between content provider and consumer… By effectively shutting down the Comixology platform for twenty-four hours, they’ve halted the revenue streams for every other digital comics publisher through this service, including DC Comics (www.readdcentertainment.com is painfully slow to the point of being almost unusable at the moment, although it’s not as bad as Comixology’s main site). While much of the Big Two’s back catalog is available on a number of platforms (iVerse, Kindle, Kobo, etc.), and DC’s new-release books are available on iBooks and Kindle, Marvel’s new-release catalog is only available through the Comixology platform. Additionally, it’s by far the preferred (and easiest-to-use) comics reading interface available for phones and tablets, and being the industry leader, it’s logical to put all one’s digital comics purchases under their umbrella. While I’m sure DC can weather the lack of revenue, I have to question how this affects an all-digital publisher like Monkeybrain, where this service outage could potentially put a hatchet to their entire revenue stream for its duration.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 12th, 2013 at 8:45 am and is filed under digital comics, Industry, Internet, Marvel. 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.