SAM: Hey, everybody!

I saw an interesting article online on Adage about how the Kindle and other electronic reading devices are going to change the comic book industry. I know that the comics industry had some qualms about how it would affect the market, because their consumers are the ones most likely to pick up the Kindle, and go out and start sharing pirated content.

On the other hand (I brought this up with a marketing teacher of mine), it is very similar to the music industry when iPods and other .mp3 players showed up, in the sense that the industry is beginning to change with the times. The article mentioned the industry starting to look at ways to get people to pay for online content.

I know Erin touched upon it in her NYCC coverage but I’d really like to hear some more about it and how people feel about the entire possibility of comics switching to a digital format.

CONNIE: Hmm… Well, my heart breaks every time I hear talk of comics going digital. I love collecting books, and the reason I buy as much as I do is because I like the way it looks on my shelf and I love comparing covers and doing all sorts of things with the books themselves. I really only feel like I’ve bought and own something if I can lay my hands on it.

On the other hand, it does make the content easier to obtain. Even living in a large city, if I decide I’d like to pick up the next volume of a series I’m catching up on, the odds of me being able to lay my hands on it are slim unless it’s a popular Viz series. I’d have to wait a week or more to have the next volumes shipped to me. But with digital distribution, I can just download it as soon as I finish the one I’m reading. Instant gratification cancels out a lot of my complaints about the digital format.

MICHELLE: I’m another one who enjoys simply admiring a printed book. The tantalizing sight of an Amazon box on my doorstep or the “Ooh! + lunge” maneuver that occurs when one spots a long-desired item at a brick and mortar store are moments to be savored. And I also agree that it only feels like it’s mine if I have tangible evidence of ownership. A book on my shelf stands a better chance of remaining in my possession indefinitely than a file on an e-reader of some kind. I just can’t trust that it won’t malfunction and lose all my stuff.

That said, I am really running out of space. I tend to collect a lot of series as they’re released and to hang on to favorites in case I want to reread them at some point. Eventually, I will run out of room. It would be convenient to be able to at least test out a series in digital format and see whether I want to invest in paper copies to have and hold, et cetera. If an entire series were only available in digital format, I suppose I would live with it and adapt, but I think I’d always feel kind of insecure about its permanence in my collection.

SAM: I am in the same boat in terms of a love of the printed book. It’s just something tangible that you can’t beat. The feel of the paper, the binding and cover. I too am sadly running out of room, however and fear I will need another bookcase soon.

To me, digital distribution is a double-edged sword. It is much more accessible, in terms of space and a good idea for series you might not be sure about, like Michelle mentioned.

I don’t agree with Connie’s point about instant gratification. It would be nice to instantly get what you want but I’ve always found that looking around and waiting for the books makes the experience worth it. When I find a book a really want in a store, it’s a feeling of accomplishment. It’s a goal. I feel like digital distribution would destroy this element of the whole process for me. Obviously, you can find it online if you search hard for it and there is some satisfaction in that, but it ties back into the tangible element of it all.

Here’s a thought that popped into my head: Would prices go down if manga started being published exclusively online? I think it’s an obvious yes, but would that encourage you to make the switch?

MICHELLE: I think for a lot of people, that would indeed encourage them to switch. Take the NETCOMICS arrangement, for example. As Melinda’s review mentioned, you can read all fifteen volumes of Let Dai on the NETCOMICS site for about five dollars total. To purchase those same volumes at their cover price would run you about $150! Of course, Right Stuf has NETCOMICS sales every so often, and their books are also included in the 4-for-3 deal that Amazon offers. Even assuming you manage to be a savvy shopper and acquire them for about $7.50 each, you’re still paying over $100 more for the print editions.

For some, the math makes the decision easy and they’ll go digital to get the story at a mere fraction of the cost. Me personally? I shelled out the dough for the print versions. I think it comes down to my estimation of a series’ quality and re-readability. I’ve heard many good things about Let Dai and felt that I would probably like to own a complete set of the books. For another series, I may decide that the discounted price is too good to pass up, and be content with the online version.

Another point to note for purposes of reviewing is that cheaper digital distribution makes it really easy to catch up on a series when faced with the task of reviewing, say, the sixth volume of a series that one has never read before.

ERIN: I also love the printed page and shell out big bucks for physical copies. I tracked the amount of money I spent on manga last year, and I’m terrified to total up those receipts.

Let’s talk about scanlations for a moment. I very rarely read scanlations, because if I’m sitting at my computer I’m generally working, and I don’t want to read longer works or even long comics electronically. The only time I make an exception is if it’s a title I really, really want to read that hasn’t been imported yet, like Addicted to Curry. But that said, I haven’t gotten around to downloading Addicted to Curry yet.

I really like the NETCOMICS browser/reader application, which almost fits my monitor just right. Reading .PDFs in Preview on a Mac can be troublesome, moreso before I got a bigger monitor with a nice resolution.

Let’s say there was a manga title I could read almost as soon as the chapter came out in Japan, like Naruto (if I was caught up) or Saint Young Men (where Jesus and Buddha are roommates). If I could read the chapters online for free in a lovely NETCOMICS-like browser, I would do it. But I’d only read one-off chapters, and not whole books on my computer. (I already bought both volumes of Saint Young Men in Japanese, even though I can’t read them.)

I think we’re also missing a couple of huge talking points here:

1. There already are digital comics. They’re called webcomics. I only read a handful of webcomics myself, and I love how recently a lot of titles are being collected for print. I read The Great Outdoor Fight last year without being familiar with Achewood and I loved it. I recently bought a Fart Party compilation and love it, but I can’t be bothered to read all of the archives online.

2. Digital reading devices. My fiancé loves reading on his computer and hates carrying books around, so he just got a Kindle 2. It looks like the future! I’m also jealous of my friends’ iPhones. I would totally read webcomics on an iPhone or a Kindle. I think I could read manga on a Kindle, because the screen size is pretty big.

I’m really against quasi-animation of comics. If I have to zoom in or scroll too much, I don’t want to read it on a screen.

That said, I don’t take my iPod on the subway! There are a lot of iPod thefts on the subway. I’m also terrified that I’d lose or break an expensive iPhone, so I still have a cheap cell phone that’s not terribly advanced.

MICHELLE: I should probably mention that even as we are having this conversation I am reading The Gentleman and the Lady on the NETCOMICS site (inspired by Connie’s review). It cost me $1.25.

Erin makes a really good point about zooming and scrolling—I’m against it, too. I don’t want to see just a single panel at a time or just a corner of a page. The flow of panels and page layouts are a big part of the manga experience. The NETCOMICS browser is great because it allows you to preserve the feel of the two-page spread. I’m not sure that even a Kindle could do that; it looks to me like it handles just one page at a time.

I do read a few webcomics, but I’ve never been tempted to buy the bound compilations. I would definitely be less picky about what kind of digital browser I was using to read a webcomic. Now I worry that makes me a snob. I certainly don’t belittle the effort and talent it takes to create a webcomic; it just still seems more like a web page to me than tangible art, if that makes sense.

MELINDA: Sam, it’s funny that this topic has come up now, because I just wrote an entry in my own blog about this last week. I’ve been trying to think about what I can say here that isn’t just repetition of that.

I suppose I can say, that in addition to the problems I whined about in my blog post, I also am a big re-reader, so something like NETCOMICS, which offers viewing only (no downloads), isn’t a great option for me. I like books, and I like owning books so that I can re-read them multiple times. I do agree with Erin in terms of reading one-off chapters of manga being released on the same schedule as Japan. There are manga series I would love to be able to do that with (the hope being, of course, that I could eventually buy them in book form as well) and if someone started releasing new chapters of those the way they do with anime at Crunchyroll, I’d be the first to sign up!

I do read a few webcomics, but they are definitely comic strip style—not the kind of epic stories that are the real reason I read comics. I think the web is really well-suited to comic strips, and that works fine for me. 21 volumes of an epic drama? Not so much.

I know in my post I didn’t sound too optimistic about portable e-readers, and I’m not, at least as they stand now. I don’t know if there is technology in our future that might make it more palatable to me, but I suppose it’s possible. One thing I will repeat from my post is how I don’t actually think this is much like the digital music revolution, or at least it hasn’t been for me. Portable .mp3 players made buying and carrying music around easier, without damaging my experience with the music in any way. Right now, I don’t feel that way about digital comics. I can understand the convenience of potentially being able to carry a large amount of comics around on an e-reader, but I’m not sold on the reading experience, and that’s a deal-breaker for me.

CHLOE: No, that makes sense, Michelle. I confess, I do read xkcd now and again, and I love everything Kate Beaton does to death, but when I always place them mentally in the realm of “awesome things on the internet” rather than “print-esque media on the internet.”

That said, I just don’t see the whole digital comics thing as being imminent. For one, I see the uptick in the popularity of e-reading devices as being sort of a natural progression and a business maneuver. Amazon is obviously aggressively pushing their revamped Kindle, but I see that as more of a move to bust open and hold onto a digital market a la Apple and the iPod. Additionally, while it’s true scanlations abound, there isn’t really a preexisting mine of legal material yet untapped that warrants a digital home. E-books have been around for, well, quite a while—what they really need is a solid device to get them out there, while comics are more or less at home in the paper format. Don’t get me wrong; I’d love to slim down my shelf space, and totally agree with the earlier benefits others have mentioned about the digital transition—I just don’t see it happening in the same way as print books.

Of course, in line with the whole iPod/Kindle comparisons is the question of distribution and rights restrictions. Apple obviously busted out the DRM, but that didn’t really end up working in the end, given there’s so much pirated material available…well, that and people balked at the idea that a third party retains control over something they paid for already. So on the one hand you have the “how do we retain control over the rights?” question while on the other, you also need an effective, carefully priced, user-friendly and accessible way to download material, perhaps accessible and simple enough that it’s not worth the effort to steal content. You could do a lot with manga available digitally—cheapen it, translate it faster, etc.—but there are plenty of questions to be answered in the interim.

CONNIE: I agree with what Michelle and Melinda said about format as far as a digital reading device goes. I think almost all manga is drawn with a two-page spread in mind, and reading them on something like a Kindle or a physical e-reader that can only accommodate one page at a time seems like it might be problematic. I can see there being a generation of comics that are made with this in mind, though, sort of like how webcomics do some things that aren’t possible in print.

The Crunchyroll-like manga service seems like it would be a good idea. There’s more than a few series where I’d love to read the new releases as they come out. I wouldn’t mind a NETCOMICS-like rental policy for something like this either, as long as the price per chapter was low enough.

Looking at NETCOMICS and the deceased ComicsOne, I think one thing that digital distribution might open the door for are series that wouldn’t be feasible in print because of low sales. I’m thinking in particular of slightly older series, like from the ‘80s and ‘90s. NETCOMICS actually has several on their site right now (The Hunter, Human Club, and a couple of the shojo one-shots), and ComicsOne was almost all older series. We likely wouldn’t see a lot of recognizable material this way, but I think it opens the door to a lot of content we might not otherwise get to read.

GRANT: Wow, you all have raised some great points. I don’t have too much to add at this point that hasn’t already been said.

Personally, I can’t imagine having a need for a device that stores scores of digital books. For starters, I never read more than one title at a time (this goes for manga and literature). Also, the only time I travel and take a book is when I go to the beach, which means I have suitcases and can pack as many books as I want.

I understand the convenience of having multiple titles in tow at once, but the reality is (at least, in my personal case) that most manga/graphic novels I purchase I will read once and will then place them back on a shelf for at least a year before wanting to re-read anything—I don’t need them to be accessible at every moment.

I’m wondering how well a Kindle digital display would be able to handle the complexities of a full-color graphic novel. That might be an issue.

MICHELLE: Well, it seems that mixed feelings are certainly the rule of the day. Hopefully if digital comics do become the norm they’ll be in a format we can learn to adapt to.

Thanks to all who participated, especially to Sam, who came up with this engaging topic and started us off so well.