<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>Digital distribution and the future of comics...hmmm.</div><div><br></div><div>When Elie first introduced me to comics, he explained that there are two kinds of comic fans: readers and collectors. Readers buy comics to read them. Collectors buy comics to have them, usually in pristine unread condition. Most people aren't exclusively a reader or a collector. Those are the people who buy a reading copy and a copy to keep in mint condition.</div><div><br></div><div>Digital distribution is great for readers. It makes the comics portable, accessible and less space-hogging. A comic book is compact, but get two or three thousand of them, and that's a lot of space, and raw poundage. </div><div><br></div><div>However, there is a logic by which digital comics will be the death of collectors. With digital media, there is nothing to collect, Sure, you can get all the files for Groo, but if all of them are on a torrent site, collecting becomes trivially easy, thus no longer much of a hobby. Porter wrote:</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><blockquote type="cite"><div><br></div><div>I think of comics as as a content <b>and</b> collector industry. Not owning a copy (or usually four or five copies) is unacceptable to me, as I imagine it is for all Groopers. </div></blockquote></div><div><br></div><div>Elie and I do not have a complete set of Groo. We are missing something like ten issues from the middle and end of the Marvel run. One of the fun parts of going to comic cons is searching through all the vendor's bins trying to find the elusive issues. To the extent that I am a collector, the fun is in the chase. Digital archives of an entire run eliminate the chase. I'm a reader. I collect the back issues so I can read them. The prospect of one day owning a complete set is gravy.</div><div><br></div><div>The secondary market for a lot of comic books would evaporate with digital archives of them. As much as I like the chase, I would probably take a nice digital copy of a Groo comic over a beat-up physical issue. Action Comics #1 will still fetch astounding prices at auctions, but a lot more middle-of-the-road late model comics are going to be quarter bin material when better digital copies of the books become easily and legally accessible.</div><div><br></div><div>I am given to believe that the comic industry has weathered some rough patches relying on collectors who buy multiple copies of books, either to have a reading copy and a collecting copy, or to have all six cover variants. Unless publishers can convince people to shell out multiple times for the same content, that strategy is toast with digital comics. I think that, to make digital comics a viable future for the industry, publishers are going to need to ensure that the expanded reader market both compensates for the reduction in multiple-buyers and actually pays for the content. If comics survived by having 50,000 people buy 100,000 copies of a physical comic book, they'll need 100,000 paying digital readers. Actually, more than that since I suspect comics will have to come down in price per issue to compete with other digital reading material. When full-on ebooks are going for $10, readers aren't going to shell out $5 for 32 pages. Of course, without the overhead of actually printing a book, the profit margin could probably be maintained at a lower price point.</div><div><br></div><div>So, I can see how digital comics would be a good prospect for the future of comics, as we become more accustomed to all of our entertainment coming in digital format. The question then is, whether electronic distribution expands the readership enough to compensate for reduced multiple-copy buyers, freeloaders who get the content without paying, and the necessary change in price structure.</div><div><br></div><div>Janet</div></body></html>