superfro

Some friends and I recently did a roundtable podcast talking about the proposed iTunes style comic distribution system, Longbox Digital Comics. (http://comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=21693)

I'd love to hear what the DVDTalk comic reading community thinks of this upcoming digitalization of comics?

al_bundy

not a comic fan, but if i was and this thing had an iphone or some other mobile app it would be a big hit. Kind of like the Kindle app for the iphone.

they have a lot of regular and comic books in the itunes store, but a lot of them are their own apps which means you have to manually delete it and keep it safe for the next time you want to read it. annoying

fujishig

I think it has a lot of cool ideas, but as the article states, success will depend on publisher adoption. I especially like the idea of getting some kind of coupon to subsidize the graphic novel if you want a hard copy... heck, if they had that idea with monthly comics, I think I'd buy more monthly comics, though I realize it's much cheaper to digitally distribute.

The other big factor, of course, is the DRM which has to be on there for the publishers to sign off.

As my comic collection (really, my tpb collection) has grown, I find that shelf space is at a premium, and I'm more open to digital distribution of comics as a whole. I do wonder how they're going to view these on smaller devices like an iphone... comic text is pretty small, and you still need the option of viewing the full page (or two pages for splashes), which was always a tough thing for me to get used to when viewing comics on a smaller computer screen (big computer screens are fine). And as I stated in the other thread, I'd probably buy more comics if I could rent some of them out instead of having to blind buy stuff all the time.

al_bundy

and there needs to be a rental system kind of like on Zune

at 32GB of music on my iphone i'm at about 1-2 months of nonstop listening. add stuff i haven't synced due to space concerns, constant new albums coming out and classic stuff i haven't had a chance to listen to yet.

i've decided i'm not going to buy anymore CD's simply because i don't want to spend $15 or whatever just to listen to it once a year or less often. MS had a rental system for $15 a month, Slacker Radio costs $50 a year for the premium service. i have a bunch of CD's i bought over the years and anything new i listen on slacker or hit the library

there needs to be some kind of subscription system where you pay per month and get access to every comic ever released and all new releases.