At C2E2. Got my GLNG #16 signed by Arron Kuder. Had lunch at a really great new food vendor at the con, called Ambrosia. It was quite good if not a little expensive. At least I won’t be starving by dinner time.
61° Mostly Cloudy
2401 S Indiana Ave, Chicago, Illinois, United States
I just received my invitation to attend Sage Summit 2013 in Washington, DC from July 23rd to the 26th at Gaylord National Hotel and Resort.
Since Sage dropped the hot potatoes it was juggling, this yearly pilgrimage is now utterly laughable and irrelevant. Not only will I not go to Washington, DC in the pit of Summer but I will definitely not be going to another Gaylord property. Those “resorts”, especially the abomination in Nashville Tennessee is a crime against humanity and an insult against nature.
My “most favored thing” today that I will do is to click the Unsubscribe button to all Sage communications. My interest drops like wet trousers around the ankles of my professional disgust. Tootles!
Comic Books. I was quite a fan of them before Mr. Johns sucker-punched me with the travesty of Brightest Day and then pushed me off the train completely with the New 52. That all being said, and in an effort to forgive some of that transgression I’ve decided to tentatively start buying comics again.
I’ve been not-reading for a very long while, despite it being very easy for me to start reading again since my Local Comic Book Store is actually in my basement, it’s all the comics that Scott has collected as he never fell off the wagon. No point in buying comics again!
Except, there is a reason to buy them again. And now we get to my three classes that I’m approaching comic books with. There are three, named, One, Two, and Three. What they mean has everything to do with how much I enjoy the books and my feelings on “rewarding” the comic book company with sales they wouldn’t have otherwise with my discretionary money.
Class Three – Comic Books I’m going to buy in digital format and catch up with. These books are my most favorite and I want to vote-with-sales the writers and artists attached to these books:
Class Two – Comic books that I want to read, but I don’t feel I want to pour money into. Since we already have these books on the premises I am going to read them. Is that theft? Reading another persons comic books? Technically I suppose if you wanted to be a huge anal dick about it you’d insist that selling a comic book has nothing to do with the paper and everything to do with the license to access the media and that license is expressly designed just for one person and not more than one person. So is reading a comic book I dig out of a white-box in my basement, theft? If so, all I really need to know is from the comic book companies, if this bothers you, please tell me and I will ignore these books below:
Class One – These are books I used to have but no longer want to read. Thankfully the ones on this list I haven’t bought in a long while and DC has actually come along and nailed them off for me. There aren’t any comics on this list.
Just in case people get really worked up about their favorite comic ending up on the Two list or the One list, know that if a comic really does well and touches me, that these are classes, not castes. I will always be open to pushing comics from One to Three or Two to Three. Just the same as comics from Three to Two or Three to One. Although it’s really quite something to ever leave Three, just so we are all on the same page.
Now it’s time for me to set up my order with Comixology. Still wishing they had a subscription model, but that’s an argument best left for another time.
I have looked into the gaping maw of the start of Con Season and lived to tell the tale. We have just returned from the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo, forever known as C2E2 with a trunkful of treasures.
One thing we didn’t bring back with us is Con Crud. Perhaps people are more careful with their expectorations or perhaps it was a benefit of us traveling by car and not by airplane, so there was no prolonged exposure to bacteria or viruses that meant us ill-will. When I’ve been taken with the urge to sneeze I have made it a general rule that I will turn my head, and sneeze into the gap between my shirt and my undershirt, in the corner. It’s called a Dracula Sneeze because that’s really what it sort of looks like. Just like Bela Lugosi hiding his head halfway in his cape, except I swap out the cape which I don’t wear for my shirt, which I do. The mythbusters proved that sneezing that way greatly reduced the chances for the ejecta to reach anyone else. My sneezing isn’t carrying anything infectious, as for me it’s just a general low-intensity hayfever that I carry around with me pretty much at all times everywhere I go. A very mild allergic response to pretty much breathing.
I bought two new tees, the first with this image of Superman:
and the second with Nightwing:
I also sprang for a lead-cast figurine of my favorite Green Lantern, Kyle Rayner. I’ll be setting that up tomorrow at my desk and it will join a posable figurine already in place on my desk. At that point people should know that I like two things in this world very much, Polar Bears and Kyle Rayner. I suppose if I had enough money I could get a DC artist to draw me Kyle Rayner riding on a running Polar Bear. That would be hilarious.
Last but certainly not least I finally have a comic art commission that I hired an artist to complete for me back when I attended San Diego ComicCon in 2010. The artist’s name is Patrick Gleason and he’s one of DC’s mainstay artists. He did a lot of Green Lantern and drew a lot of my favorite GL, Kyle Rayner. Currently he does Batman and Robin for DC, but back in 2010 he had done a lot of Kyle. I hired him for a commission and time and life (and DC Comics) got in the way. I understand that work comes first, right alongside family, so I wasn’t piss-and-vinegar when it came to completion. I didn’t want my money back and I am a very patient fan, especially for artists that draw my favorite GL. So I waited. Yesterday I made contact with Mr. Gleason and I had fallen completely off his radar and he was very shocked and apologetic. He offered me my money back, or the sketch, and I reiterated my wish for the sketch and my willingness to wait, hopefully not so long this time. Today I got a call that he had finished my sketch and I went to fetch it. As always, his work is amazing. It was well worth the wait and I bear him no ill-will. As it turns out, I didn’t even notice that the sketch was extra-special on first glance. It took me a few moments to take it all in that I discovered that he had also included another GL (which I like a lot) named Mogo in the background. For those that don’t know, Mogo is a Green Lantern. Mogo is a sentient planet, and in the comics acts as a counselor for upset GL as well as the moral compass for GL rings to select new bearers. So not only did the sketch have my favorite GL, but it had really nice touches like various chiaroscuro GL symbols, and also Mogo! My next step is to have it framed and placed next to my other sketch of Kyle Rayner that I commissioned from Tyler Kirkham, another artist who does Kyle very well, for DC. This will be the second piece of artwork that I have on my walls from Mr. Gleason. A while back Scott commissioned him to render Kyle Rayner and Saint Walker standing back-to-back. That is hanging on the wall by my bedside and I go to bed and wake up appreciating his artwork every single day. Now that this commission is complete I do feel a sense of closure, and I do know that it won’t be the last bit of artwork I purchase from Mr. Gleason. The same sentiment goes for Mr. Kirkham, assuming he will be game for drawing Kyle in the future. Time will tell.
One thing that I do notice and I say this a lot, especially after conventions is a reminder to people on how to best handle their superhero tees after they get them home. These shirts seem like silly little things to most people, but for comic book geeks like us, they mean a lot more to us than a sport jacket or a fine suit. Remember everyone, that if you want your shirts to last you have to launder them carefully. Always turn them inside out, wash in cold water, and then right when they are done from the washer, turn them right side out and hang them up to dry. Never ever ever ever put them in the drying machine!
That all being said, most of the laundry is nearly done and I’m still up writing this blog entry. One of the curses of living in the eastern time zone and enjoying a con in the central time zone is that biologically speaking I’m off by an hour. This will continue until tomorrow morning when my internal clock is realigned with this time zone. Partially I’m waiting for laundry to finish, but really I’m relaxing here writing up the C2E2 blog post and being here for my boys, who both missed us terribly while we were gone. Now that we’re home, it’s time to plotz on daddy, whichever daddy ends up being plotzable. The condition to be plotzable has everything to do with sitting on a couch and not moving at all. 
I will be taking more pictures and sharing them from the hall of honor for our comic book art. Scott has a commission in-progress from Jim Cheung, for Billy Kaplan, who is a Young Avenger in the Marvel comic book universe who’s codename is Wiccan. We already have a sketch of Billy in the hallway, but I’m looking forward to this new one from Mr. Cheung. I wonder if these artists ever expect their work to be framed professionally and hung so lovingly by their fans. It’s half the reason we go to conventions as it is, to meet the people who illustrate our favorite characters and put cold hard cash right in their hands. No middlemen, no DC, no Marvel, just artist and fan, and cash. A lot of cash. And each cent spent for this work is worth it. We have a lot of wall space and a lot of fandom.
Yesterday Scott talked me into downloading DC Universe Online and joining up as a “Free to Play” player. I cleaned up my old Dell gaming PC as DCUO is a PC-only game and loaded it onto my computer at home. The client and all the content clocks in at over 20GB so it took a while to download across the network.
Once I got the game installed I had to fix DirectX, and then after that it ran. I had seen it during Sony’s beta test of the game and wasn’t terribly impressed or thrilled with the gameplay mostly because the human interface was so different from what I was used to with City of Heroes from NCSoft. I knew Scott was very keen on having me play so I relented and agreed to play the game. While going through the lead-in trial course that every new player has to go through I revisited the same issues I had before when playing the game. The mouse and keyboard controls are maddening. I was cussing and swearing while trying to button-mash. It felt like the inanity of a Playstation game, where you dispense with the pleasantries of the cut-scenes and the lame lead in until you move a figure to a part of the screen and then click like you’ve got Parkinson’s.
Near the end of playing yesterday, around lunchtime I went exploring the settings of the game and discovered to my chagrin a setting called “Invert Camera” and that singular adjustment made the game MAKE SENSE TO ME. All of a sudden the game played much more like City of Heroes and once I was beyond that obnoxious hurdle I actually really got into playing the game.
What do I think of DCUO? It’s certainly a competent game and is engaging. The mission system is acceptable and the play itself is entertaining and worth my time. The only real issue that remains with DCUO is how much lag the mouse pointer has when it’s not controlling the camera in-game. You have to have patience with the pointer as it doesn’t fly as your mouse moves, it instead feels like the game is asking the computer to manually redraw the mouse each time the mouse updates. This is irritating but not so much to make me stop playing the game.
As I play more of DCUO I’ll have more experience and will most likely refine my critique of the game and if I have the presence of mind enough I may blog about it again in the future. Or I won’t. We’ll see.
Last night I had a complicated knot work of dreams and a central theme was this epic-level conflict that happens cyclically between ages of time. It was, I’m sure, inspired surely by The Wheel of Time, but there were elements dragged into the dream by DC comics twin events Blackest Night and Brightest Day. A pillar of this dream was a central figure that provided a safety net and a structure to ensure that the conflict was always won by the right, and not by the wrong.
I woke up with this idea in my head and I started to muse about what this might mean in the fictional DC Universe. It’s been a story theme that my favorite Green Lantern, Kyle Rayner, has served to hold up everything in the bleakest of times. For a while he was the only Lantern in the stories and the writers seem to enjoy using him as a character for these situations. Now that we’ve entered The GL War we’ve got all these emotions floating around and Kyle has already proven himself capable of surpassing fear in his willpower, so he’s one of the few who can cope with actually feeling things while maintaining his abilities. While the GL universe falls apart, it struck me that Kyle could once again play the role of torchbearer-in-dark-times by handling all seven emotional-spectrum rings, and there is a little part of me at thinks that Kyle could carry the White Lantern and play the part temporarily as he did when he served as the vessel for Ion. It’s just a shot in the dark, but perhaps that’s where DC will take the GL War. I’m always very excited whenever my favorite lantern gets some action. It’d definitely be gratifying to know that Kyle is always the go-to-Lantern leaving Hal in the dust. One can hope.
Earlier tonight I received in my email inbox an independently run survey from Marvel about Digital Comics! Oh what a surprise! I of course filled out the survey on my iPhone, since it was the device I had handy at the time I saw the incoming email.
How much do I spend on comic books per week? $2.39.
Yes, that’s right. I buy 1 comic book a week. Sometimes two if it’s a “busy week”. None of those books are Marvel, they are all DC, or I should say, the one or both are DC.
How much could I spend on comic books? From what comes home from the local comic book store, if I were to buy it myself would end up being far more, around $200 a month. DC and Marvel don’t get my money because they already get Scott’s money. He loves his comics more than I because he gets something out of what he reads, while all I get is shrug-tastic yawns. I once had Deadpool on my pull list, that lasted a month and then I stopped. Brief flashes of brilliance aren’t enough to keep me loyal, that sort of thing is likely to drive me away.
So the survey wanted to know a bunch of interesting things. How much I spend, what my education level is, how much money my household makes. Yes Marvel, you could get more money out of me, but you FAIL. It’s not that it’s just Marvel doing the failure, it’s the entire industry letting me down. I had a dream that when Apple released the first iPad that comic book apps would be hot on the heels of that release. In my head I had an idea about how things ought to have gone:
Of course Marvel and DC don’t do it this way. Instead they make three or four issues available and then when you’ve got a taste they shunt you to a comic book store for paper! Thanks guys, BUT IF I WANTED PAPER I WOULD HAVE !@#$ BOUGHT PAPER TO START! I’m a “DIGITAL CUSTOMER”. I’m not going to come in out of the cold. I will stop altogether if it’s just dead trees you’re selling! They can’t seem to get that central idea. Right now they hide behind their digital app, which is just a rebranded Comixology app to make the experience “rich for digital presentation”. NEWS FLASH GUYS, I don’t give a flying rip about “rich digital presentation”, all I want is my comics on my device. Not on dead trees! So that is where my cognitive dissonance comes into play. These companies HAVE TO ship all their fancy bits using some sort of electronic means, so say it’s a PDF or a bunch of images in a ZIP file (that’s a CBZ kids!) so what exactly is the cost for “publishing digital content” when all you have to do is create a channel for your customers to pay for you to SEND THEM WHAT YOU ARE ALREADY SENDING EACH OTHER?!? That’s all people like me really want. Yes, having the fancy Comixology app is pleasurable, but it isn’t the make-or-break for us people. It’s having a dependable source of your product, product we wish to pay for as long as you are upright and fair, so will we be upright and fair.
But since you ignored us…
That’s what happened. Marvel and DC ignored this new infant business model. They could have pioneered the way with people like me. People who really could give a flying rip about dead trees. They could have caught us right at that magic moment, could have gotten up to $1200 a YEAR in PURE GIMME GIMME PROFIT. It wouldn’t have required any actual human resources. They could have simply created an email list and included us, their digital subscribers in a CC with the email they send to their printers in China for mass production of their dead-tree product. We would have gone that last-mile and repackaged it, polished it, hell, even put the pages in numerical order and forgiven bleeding errors or color variations if we could have gotten what we wanted for the same price as the dead-tree product a day later than the dead-tree product hit the streets. The credit transactions would have been PURE GIMME.
Nobody did. The window closed and the digital customers, still to this day are locked out in the cold. We see the comic books in the stores. We look at our stores, the sometimes nice people behind the counter, the sometimes obnoxious. The owners hovering like worried nannies, we browse, we fiddle with the dead-tree copies but we don’t buy them. We don’t want dead trees clogging up our lives.
What has happened? Some of us in the digital-only crowd have given it our best rational shot. We wanted to make a pull list at www.marvel.com and www.dccomics.com. We wanted to subscribe! We had credit cards in hand! We saw the app, we were intoxicated by its candy sweetness and we saw we could buy issues. We squealed with joy, and we bought a few. Then the reality set in. The files weren’t open, they weren’t ours. Despite buying something we had nothing to show for it. No way to back up those files on CD, DVD, or USB Memory Sticks. Then we noticed that we couldn’t get the Fantastic Four from this point forward on digital. We could get three oddly-mislabeled comics (contemporary 1990′s huh?) and then an icy shoulder and a bony finger pointing us to our “Local Comic Book Store”. Something we never wanted to do. We are the digital only crowd!
So an anonymous group appeared on the network. They bought dead-tree product and hacked it up, then scanned it and created files. They bound them into CBZ or CBR files and included them in giant archives and made them available to the entire network. They effectively undid the abuse the original digital files endured by hauling them back from the dead-tree world and back into the digital one. In the meantime Marvel and DC watched all these potential sales simply NOT HAPPEN. What’s the worst embarrassment of all is that resources could have been saved, trouble could have been avoided and a certain segment of your customer base could have been gratified if you had simply sold us the images and skipped the dead-tree part of your business model!
Again with the cognitive dissonance. Why isn’t it this way? It seems mind-achingly stupid that this hasn’t happened already. There has to be another reason, nothing can remain this deaf and absurd without some sort of extenuating circumstance. This got me to thinking about what those reasons might be. There is a fly in this ointment. That is Diamond Publishing and Comic Book Stores. The idea of a comic book producer skipping that part of the equation all together has to scare the daylights out of Diamond Publishing. They have a monopolistic lock on the distribution business for all comic books produced. This digital comic book thing has to be a monumental concern for them, because as the middle-men, digital comic books effectively eliminate them from the equation altogether. So really, is it Marvel and DC who are being pigheaded about sales and what they’ve lost or do they no longer have full control over their figurative testicles? The only thing that properly explains all the odd behavior from the big two content creators is that Diamond Publishing has giant C-Clamps screwed down tight on both Marvel and DC’s collective testicles and each time this idea comes up, the clamps get screwed down a little tighter. I have to assume that there was a meeting between Diamond and Marvel/DC that went something like this: “If you sell directly we’ll fuck you. We’ll walk away from the table and your product can just sit in the shipping containers at the port and rot. You need us because a majority of your business is about US, not about YOU.” and then the content creators whined a little, and went back to being obedient Diamond Publishing customers. Meanwhile as all of this might have happened, Nero fiddled and Rome burned. I don’t know if this really happened or what, but it does explain why Marvel and DC behave the way they do. It’s the only thing that makes sense. If Marvel and DC could get $2.99 per issue and have a flat production cost and maximize their profit AND THEN DROP IT, something has to be going on.
So does Diamond have a leg to stand on? No. I’m not going to rush out to my Comic Book Store and pay for dead-trees. Not reading is preferable to filling up my life with murdered trees for temporary gratification. If I’m not ever going to come in from the cold, then my buying directly from the source shouldn’t upset anyone, other than the guessed potential that I might go to a comic book store, even when it’s obviously, and plainly stated that I will not.
So I just read what Scott brings home. He puts the comics on the countertop and I rifle through them and pick out what I want to read and that’s life. I’m not going to buy the flesh of a murdered tree for a reason as slim as “wanting to support an industry”. While I’m rifling and wandering downstairs and picking through the longboxes in the basement for comics I want to read, those people who put every comic book in creation in giant BitTorrent archives and make them available for free are exsanguinating the content creators and eventually a lost opportunity will grow into business poison. January sales aren’t what they were last year, and last months was better than this months. How far can this particular scenario carry on before something breaks?
I know that Marvel and DC care very deeply about what they do. It’s art for goodness sake! But eventually all this lost revenue will have to be addressed. This letter is to Marvel and DC both. I’m willing to pay you the fair published price for fair-trade goods. No DRM, no lame bullshit, no “Enhanced Presentation” is required. You know what a CBZ is and you can make it happen. I will stop rifling thru my basement and buy “another copy” of each comic book I enjoy if only you cut the bullshit. It’s a reason why I started commissioning art at conventions. There are artists I adore and so, paying them cash, knowing that it helps their bottom line is about as far as I’m willing to compromise on this. I categorically refuse to buy the flesh of murdered trees. I’ve been waiting for Apple to go the distance and create the iPad. It’s now in your corner to grab the brass ring of turning me into a paying customer.
It reminds me of a funny song line I once heard, “I don’t want the whole world, just your half.” Really I don’t even want that. Making a CBZ and sending it to me should be negligible, and I am willing to pay for that. Only that mind you. If it’s wrapped in DRM Comixology silliness then forget it. Fair Trade. Fair Play. I believe one of your characters has that as his historical tagline. Ring a Bell?
And this ends the second day of C2E2. What did we learn today? We learned that DC Artists make really bad panelists when DC Writers should be featured, but they make great panelists when DC Artists should be featured. We also learned that any phrase that includes “Wally West” will force everyone who is connected to DC to slip into a vexed silence. DC panels are quite like playing a guessing game where the rules are hidden, the vocabulary is hidden, and the success of your attempts are also hidden. It’s magnificently fun and actually a delight, especially when played with annoying children who ask impertinent questions to utterly disaffected DC staffers.
We also learned that DC is wholly preoccupied with how their fans had reacted poorly to the idea that the new event, called Flashpoint would require a significant number of purchases. DC spent an inordinate amount of time trying to “cover their ass” by informing us all that the financial burden wouldn’t be that bad and that we could all read the central work and none of the tie-ins and still enjoy the work. Shortly thereafter Marvel announced their big event with the exact same protestations that nobody really had to buy the entire run but only purchase a core number of books to get enjoyment from the story. Nothing like aggressive retreat in the face of decline. Snatching the brass ring of failure from the maw of a dark and uncertain future.
It’s good to note that DC and Marvel still behave like petulant children when it comes to each other. The fans are pretty much ignorant of the distinctions and many DC fans like Marvel work and the opposite is also true. The backbiting and sniping however are quite choice. Really it’s a pissing match between Warner Brothers and Disney. It’s quite something to watch Bugs Bunny piss all over Mickey Mouse. It just helps build that image that whatever you thought about the health of your inner child is properly violated now that the two companies that you thought would never turn on you and treat you like a slab of cash-stuffed meat-product, in fact, are.
About midway today I was so tired of DC treating this as a throwaway trash event that I was close to giving up on the entire company. I read Brightest Day only because I have respect for the lead writer and I have hope that the story will go somewhere before it ends. It feels a lot like a Stephen King novel, which is to say very flat for 80% and maximally great for the last 20%. I vowed I would never read another Stephen King book sohelpmegod, and I’m getting close to throwing Brightest Day in with Stephen King.
Marvel is just an exercise in impenetrability. I fell off the Marvel wagon years ago and I have no idea where to start. Because I can’t get started again I don’t really feel like I want to start. There’s five or six, maybe, events between Civil War and Fear Itself, and I don’t really care that much to even try to come up with the right questions that might give me some traction. So Marvel keeps on publishing and have created several tounge-in-cheek comedy gold moments, like the endless Deadpool titles, the Rainbow of Hulks, and an endless house of mirrors when you bring up the word “Avengers”. Now Marvel is trying to address this with “.1″ releases, but it has the same stain that these overarching events have, that it feels like a cash-grab. When I was a kid I really liked the Fantastic Four. Now that I’m an adult I read it and even after reading a dozen issues it has lost that special feeling I used to have, so I’ve stopped caring about it, stopped reading it, and I don’t really think much of it any longer. It occupies no mind-space in my head. DC used to, but ever since the blind wandering that is Brightest Day (read: The Stephen King-ization) I’ve been finding it very hard to continue interest in DC’s work either.
This leads to the next blog entry, which is a marvelous load of WTF laid by Marvel just tonight in my email inbox. That gem is coming up next.
Watching the scuffle going on between SONY and Apple over SONY’s eBook reader has started me thinking not about the actual conflict here, but a more general and overarching issue which runs along the top of all of this. A few days ago Scott brought up this issue to me and had shared with me that if Apple does what they are going to do to SONY, that it could invalidate the Kindle store, the nook store, and the Comixology store from the iPad and that without those, he’d sell his iPad the first chance he got.
That piqued my interest and I read more about the entire argument online. Apple wants to channel all content through iTunes, that makes a lot of sense, it keeps the user experience very streamlined and is incredibly profitable for Apple. In many ways, Apple has created a lever and all these other companies have happily stabbed themselves with the pointy-end of the lever and now Apple has grabbed the other end and is starting to apply pressure. Is it unfair? Perhaps to Barnes & Noble, perhaps to Amazon, perhaps also to DC and Marvel too, through Comixology, but let’s be clear here, all these companies walked into Apple’s Den, they had to know that eventually Apple would smell the blood money and eventually key off a feeding frenzy which ends up in a policy change. It’s Apple’s device, it’s Apple’s playground. Yes, it’s rather a vicious thing to do, to trap your enemies in your spider web and then feed off them, but that’s the mean side of capitalism. It’s not very pretty, but it is expected.
Above all of this petty capitalistic bullshit there is an overarching issue which isn’t being discussed. Every single player in this drama has one central pillar that holds up the big tent that they are all fighting under. This pillar is that of DRM and “Closed Format” data. It’s this that keeps people interested in iBooks, nook, Kindle, or Comixology. None of these companies are really doing anything altogether great for their customers, basically selling them monolithic black boxes that you need the companies help to open and enjoy. This is the darker side of eBook publishing. When you publish a physical book you can go anywhere to get it and then read it anywhere you like, you can give it away, you can tear the binding off and copy it and give it to a friend, or you can recite it to a blind person for their entertainment if you so wish. With these closed formats, you can’t do anything like that without the express permission of the company that originally sold you that product. This chafes and irritates me.
If eBooks were sold in truly open formats, such as ePub or plain-PDF then people have the liberty to do as they wish, to have true freedom and every issue above simply vanishes. If Apple refuses to let companies sell without taking a cut, then the companies can just sell ePub/PDF files from their own websites and then email the file to the customer. Then the customer can use whatever app they like to read the file on the device they like. For me that’s iBooks on my iPad, for some of my friends, that could be their nook or even their Kindle. Open Formats break the central pillar of control that these companies use to skewer us as customers and rake us over the coals of use-restrictions. You want to give your book to a friend? Send the file to them. Done. Simple. No silly 14-day lending rules, no “can’t print this file” DRM bullshit, and these eBooks, in their open state become valuable even to people such as the blind who need TTS services to enjoy the product.
When I see this argument and see these companies whining about how bad Apple is to them, I see these companies with their own sharpened-pointy levers shoved into their customers. Apple pushes the companies, the companies push the consumer. Who gets it in the end? The consumer. You know full well that if Apple takes a 30% cut, the companies will just hike their prices by 30% and call it a “mean Apple tax” and pass the pain on to the consumer. Open formats would eliminate all of this, it would encourage true competition and take the teeth out of this entire batch of bullshit.
Consumers should vote with their dollars. They should only buy ePub, PDF, CBR, or CBZ files and reject every other format for eBook data. To do anything else would be to “Invite the Vampires” into your home and once they are inside, it’s all over. None of these companies truly care about how they treat the customer, the customer is just this anonymous schmuck who is designed to get it, and get it hard, in the end.
As a sideline, we’ve seen this sense more and more often, that customers are enemies. It’s an odd relationship. Without customers these companies would die, without these companies we might not see as much innovation and product. Both sides desperately want to screw the other side and both sides dream of a world where the other side is properly punished and they both can’t live the same without the other! I see evidence of this all the time in the things I hear:
Not that open formats would solve these extended problems, but at least for us consumers it would go very far in removing our pawns from the chessboard of bullshit that these companies are trying to get us trapped in. The best way to win at Tic-Tac-Toe is not to play.
I’ve seen this show up on Twitter quite a bit, the slowly degrading sales figures for popular comic books and what might be behind it. As a light consumer of comic books I can at least state a few things that keep me from buying many comic books:
Really the biggest point I have to make here is that by not being “The Brave and The Bold” when it comes to digital comics, people like me aren’t going to make any investment in the product and we’re just going to lurk in the dark and keep our buying power in abeyance. I’m not interested in a teaser issue with the punchline at the end being “Visit your local comic book store for more!”, sorry, but no, I don’t want to. I want to “Visit my Comic Book App for more!” when I want more. Unfortunately by not heeding the opportunity, not filling a vacuum, regular folk have filled it. Nature abhors a vacuum and in this case, certain services and new open-source file types such as CBR and CBZ have filled up all the space that could have been occupied by profit-making comic book sales. I’ve said it before and I will repeat myself here, if you fail to innovate, your customers will innovate without you and then you’ll miss the train completely and be left walking along the tracks. It’s funny to see how many old-school publisher/consumer business models failed to adapt to the Internet, you can see the bodies littered all over, Music, Movies, Television, and as unpleasant as it is to say, Comic Books. By not embracing the bleeding edge of technology each model has created subsequent vacuums and people have found ways to fill those vacuums without any one publisher being able to draw any benefit. When popular media takes technology and the Internet seriously, then you’ll see a turn-around, but not before then. As they stuff their heads in the sand, ever deeper, the erosion will just get progressively worse.
You could sum up this lesson that popular media really should learn in one really great curt statement: “Innovate or Die!” So, get busy innovating, or get busy dying.