RonG617

Decided to pick up some of the FCBD 2022 freebies and then I realized they no longer have a spot for new purchases. I had to look at the email receipt and then find each of the books in my library to download them.

Josh-da-man

The weird thing about the digital revolution is that it often seems like they're trying to push paying customers toward piracy.

The choice is that you can pay to consume content on clunky, bloated, spammy DRMed platforms that are difficult to navigate, or you can consume content for free when, where, and how you want to without any strings attached.

Does nobody, outside of the music industry, understand this? Did Napster kicking their ass twenty years ago make them realize that easy, cheap, and available was the way to go?

Trevor

Big Heavy Metal bundle. I’m a maybe so far.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/s...vy-metal-books

fujishig

I get why it's clunkier: they want to make sure you don't download it and share it with a million of your closest friends, which would just make pirating even easier, and no medium seems to have an elegant solution for that that punishes the bad and not the good.

But I'm not sure the music industry is the paragon that we should hold up here, considering how streaming music has affected the music revenue streams. I'm sure if they paid creators less, they could make this stuff cheaper.

That said, if you like Marvel or DC there are subscription services that work well enough, just with a delay.

davidh777

I don’t think it’s a fault of the digital industry as much as it is Amazon just shitting the bed in the Comixology transfer.

fujishig

Right, the real question is, is this intentional (tanking monthly comics sales) because they want to minimize the hassle? If it's not, there's a ton of incompetence.

davidh777

Yeah, I have no doubt revenue is dropping through the floor. My guess is it’s not intentional as much as it is them just not caring. You’d think they’d want to stay on the good side of publishers but who knows.

Red Hood

It's incompetence at every level. A big problem is that both Marvel and DC have cut positions that would have taken care of resolving this issue with Amazon. Instead, they have now someone who's overworked, underpaid and overloaded to handle this situation and it's not in their top 10 priority as of this moment.

Undeadcow

Exhibit 104: There is a DC Memorial Day sale so epically big it requires two sale categories; but the sale categories only list the first few dozen books [not much past Batman in part I] and finding the rest of what might be included requires some serious digging or guesswork.
[Also prices don't seem to have changes to sale prices yet in all cases making it even more difficult - an item you search up might be on sale just not yet; nevermind that Amazon indicates a bogus 'digital list price' to suggest everything is on sale at 'kindle price' anyway; Far Sector, etc is included with a '$29.99' 'digital list price' and a '$19.99' 'Kindle price' but no clear 'Memorial Sale' reduction, etc etc].

TheAllPurposeNothing

Seems to be a nice bundle of Dynamite titles available: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/b...ynamite-books?

Initial interest is in The Boys compendiums. Thoughts about the other series included? A number of Red Sonja, Vampirella and Swords of Sorry titles also in the mix, but I have less familiarity with those series.

davidh777

I like some of the Red Sonja, but I have a number of different series and honestly have trouble remembering which is which.

I want to like Dejah Thoris, but the art is too sloppy and cartoony for me (and I like cartoony art).

Miss Fury is a little over the top, but I like it.

I think I read several issues of Jennifer Blood and liked it.

tonyc3742

Jennifer Blood is an exceedingly violent revenge story. Makes sense I guess since it's from Garth Ennis. I liked it. It seemed to be a limited series with some actual closure which was nice.
I'm reading through a couple Dejah Thoris titles now and yeah the art is a little loose.
There's a decent bit of overlap between this bundle and a previous Groupees Dynamite bundle, I'm going through my files and seeing a number of Vamp, Dejah, Swords of Sorrow repeats. But between The Boys and some of the more 'one shot' titles it looks like there's still enough to be a worthwhile purchase.
I'm going to probably pick up the Heavy Metal bundle as well. I don't care too much about the Transformers one.

I haven't opened the Comixology app in over a month. I still have plenty of unread titles I "own" there, but once I finished the Crime SuspenseStories or whatever book I was reading, I wanted a break from fighting with the app. I'm reading multiple issues from these bundles via PerfectViewer a night. (just finished Terry Moore's "Echo").

John Pannozzi

And now you can no longer purchase comics through Comixology's Android App:

https://bleedingcool.com/comics/comi...se-on-android/

Red Hood

Long thread on how Comixology will supposedly fix things in the near future

Trevor

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/c...ics_bookbundle
complete Love & Rockets for $25

fujishig

Another one where I have most of it on comixology but I'm tempted because comixology is now crap.

fujishig

The QR code on the (awesome) Jim Lee DC bags for comicon have a link to a code to get DC Universe Unlimited for 50 bucks for the year: SDCC22QR

majorjoe23

Image has a new Humble Bundle up with a lot of books. 75 issues of Savage Dragon, 60 issues of The Darkness, around 90 issues each of Spawn and Witchblade, plus a lot of other stuff.

Image Comics 30th Anniversary: The 2000s (pay what you want and help charity) (humblebundle.com)

tonyc3742

They've got the 90s collection up again as well if you missed it the first time, and want to get the first bunches of Spawn, Dragon, Witchblade and Darkness.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/i...books-rebundle

Not sure if there's anything different in it from the last time they offered it in April.

My "comics" folder is almost 300GB, between Humble, Fanatical, and Kickstarter. That's not even counting the stuff locked behind Comixology's walled garden.
So many comics. (Some duplicates because I downloaded both cbz and pdf, but not many.)

BackStJoe

So…one thing that has gotten under my skin is lack of meaningful sales.
They have some, but prices are significantly higher.

Undeadcow

It is disappointing to see "sales" (such as they are) only include trade collections and no longer singles in most cases across publishers even on their own non-Comixology digital storefronts. I'm curious what might have motivated that change.

RonG617

I guess they can't do the buy one get one sales anymore since everything is an instant purchase now and you can't add things to the cart.

fujishig

Had to be intentional, right? Keeping an archive of every monthly comic, selling them individually while also selling collections and then on top of that discounting large groups of singles must have tremendous overhead. And if they haven't been intentionally trying to kill monthly digital sales then they're even more incompetent than I thought.

Josh-da-man

Fully switching over to the Amazon/Kindle store and ecosystem?

Amazon doesn't really do sales in the traditional sense; they'll price match other sites, and I've noticed from my Kindle wishlist that they'll randomly drop prices of random books down to $0.99 for a short time, but they don't seem to do any kind of meaningful, advertised sales.

davidh777

Eh, I don’t agree. They have regular kindle sales, and back in the day they had regular DVD/BD sales.

The transition did kill off the BOGO sales, as when CMX used to have those, AMZN had an equivalent promo that reduced the same sales to half price, which was sort of convenient in that you didn’t have to buy two. But the best thing was stacking the CMX sales.

I miss the sales on single issues, but honestly the purchase process is now so cumbersome that I might not bother anyway.