Monday, February 13, 2012

Comics on digital suck.

O.K. If I'm reading Brian Hibbs report of DC's report at the ComicsPro meeting correctly:

They rebooted DC comics with same day digital fully expecting that the digital sales would skyrocket.

Instead, the physical comics skyrocketed, and digital was a pale shadow. They are now seeing digital as a promotional tool for the comics instead of the other way around.

It turns out, most of the digital encoded comics were never redeemed -- the copies were being bought as a collectable, instead.

Would seem to me that the comics publishers should really continue to support comic books until the situation clearly changes, instead of trying to pull the rug out from under them.

(I've said it many times -- I think the book people should have tried the same thing, (digital same price) but they didn't, alas. They are busily self-destructing.)

Is there a newspaper or magazine that hasn't done digital? And how are they doing?

2 comments:

RDC said...

I have commented here before that Baen publishing was an early adopter of digital. What they have found is their digital sales has helped their paper sales.

They have even gone so far as to create a free book library of several of their authors backlist. The end resut has been more readers becoming familar with their authors and improving sales on new releases (both digital and paper).

The book industry is relatively opaque. There are far far more books published than an individual reader can keep familar with. As a result the challenge for selling books is getting the authors introduced to the potential readers than anything else.

H. Bruce Miller said...

"I've said it many times -- I think the book people should have tried the same thing, (digital same price) but they didn't, alas."

You mean charge the same price for the digital edition as for the hardbound book? That would never fly.