The discussion from the Longbox panel at San Diego Comic-Con evoked heated commentary against DRM file formats, flash development, and the business of digital comic books.
“If I purchased a comic on my computer, I should be able to also read that on my xbox or my iPhone or my hypothetical (touch screen tablet) reader… There should not be an additional price for that. There should not be an additional penalty for it and [it] shouldn’t dictate to me how I logically can use the content I purchased,” said Rantz Hoseley, CEO of Longbox, a company that’s producing an application that seeks to do for digital comics what iTunes did for music and video.
[For a demo of the Longbox application, see our video coverage -- Read: SDCC 09 Video: Longbox Digital Comics App Demo]
Hoseley’s comments read like they were part of a discussion thread on digg or reddit when written down. It’s not difficult to understand why there’s been a decent amount of buzz surrounding the efforts of the Longbox crew after the public debut at Hero Con. The app is scheduled to launch late October/ early November with (tentatively) more than seven publishers that include: Archia, Shadowline Sliverline, Boom Studios, Top Cow, Richard Starking’s library of content (Elephant Men), and other creator owned and published comics.
“We spent the first two years working through the business model — really addressing what it would have to do in order to be successful,” Hoseley said, adding that it would need to make sense from the standpoint of users, publishers and to a lesser extent, reassess emphasis on the retailers.
Addressing Users, Publishers and Retailers
Users would get the Longbox application free, with promotional comics (or a selected group of pages) preloaded. Anything purchased through the app will scale to other devices, thus retaining the physical advantage of a printed comic. The base-pricing for a single issue is $.99, but could be reduced with a yearly subscription to a monthly title. They could also get more for their money by buying “comic blocks” in bulk, which would be similar to xbox live credits — the exception being that one block would equal $1, according to panelists.
Still, publishers are hesitant to embracing a digital format into their business model.
“One publisher said to me, ‘I’m not a very technologically savvy individual but when I see these guys demos, it’s fucking obvious from the get-go that this is just a modified PDF viewer and how much of an idiot do they think I am?,’” Hoseley said, recalling one of the many demos he conducted at the New York Comic Con earlier this year. “That’s one of the reasons I think that publisher have been very positive towards it because we’ve really gone through all of the different aspects.”
According to Hoseley, publishers that sign up with Longbox, would benefit from having much lower production costs (which translates to more profit) and the ability to scale books to other platforms with minimal increase in production time.
In terms of retailers, the company is working on a way to offer a physical copy of the trade paperback at a discounted price for those that still want it, Hoseley said, adding that it wouldn’t effect the bulk of sales at comic shops since they don’t carry much outside of the mainstream.
“No matter how much we talk about, ‘as an industry, how do we bring people into comic shops’ there is a large percentage of humanity who are never going to get into a comic shop,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean they don’t like comics.”
