Last week to much fanfare Marvel announced Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited A subscription based service where comic book fans could trawl Marvel's back catalogue and read Spider-Man until they were ready to puke.
Having looked at the service since the servers became stable (Marvel.com ground to a halt seconds after the announcement. MySQL error messages popped up everywhere. Hey Donncha! Caching is the answer right?), I've had time to dig into the service.
It sucks.
Seriously.
If any industry stood to make a ton of cash from online distribution it was the insular comic book industry. Comic books are a backwater niche where 5% of the readers buy 80% of the books. That's a dead end market and a reason why television, movie and toy licensing are the areas which comic book publishers increasingly depend on to turn profit.
Superman is a profitable comic book franchise for DC but it's a hell of a lot more profitable for parent company Time Warner when you throw in the Smallville TV series, the Superman movies/Saturday morning cartoons and toy/apparel licensing of the "S" shield world wide. The same goes for Batman and Wonder Woman but the average age of comic book readers is increasing year over year not decreasing. Comic book publishers are failing to grow readership while the routes to market for their product have declined to such a point that a single distributor has a monopoly over the distribution of their printed product.
So how do you get comics into the hands of people not reading them? Go after the iTunes Music Store generation. Go after the digital download generation. Instead what we have in this version of MDCU is Web 1.0 thinking and good old fashioned protectionism of an antiquated direct sales model.
You subscribe to the service monthly and get access to their scanned archives there is no download option so you're grabbing pages from their servers with every page turn and reading them in their patent pending reader app. The problem I have with the reader app is that it's advanced functionality is a bit wacky and the resolution of the page scans is poor under magnification.
You'd think that a product which is digitized the moment the inking is done would allow for a high res image. You'd be right. Right now it looks that for various bandwidth and anti-piracy reasons they have gone a bit too lossy with the image compression for my tastes. But that's the point now isn't it? It's not supposed to look as good as it would had you gone out and bought a printed version.
They also appear to only be going for a back issue only strategy. Instead of this week's hot releases being available you'll be lucky if they've material which was on the shelves 12 months ago. Yet again a concession to dingy poorly stocked comic book stores.
Focusing on existing readers digital distribution would be a boon for a couple of reasons. Storage capacity (Hard Drives Vs Bookshelves) and the book you've heard good things about not being there when you make it to a store are just two of them.
Marvel publisher Dan Buckley has made rumblings that this is Marvel's answer to digital piracy of their products. That's only half true since both Marvel and DC have been issuing cease and desist letters to web sites hosting links to torrents and direct downloads on file sharing services such as RapidShare or Mega Upload for the past few weeks.
This is pointless since those sites just point to content already pirated shutting them down won't stop a single book from being pirated.
This is the music piracy war all over again and MDCU as it stands today is one of those subscription services which flamed out quickly back then. It doesn't offer any significant advantage over going to the trouble of tracking down this week's releases, downloading them and then buying something else at store later.
While some collectors will settle for a download of the monthly's they'll buy the much higher margin hardcover editions in dead tree format. Those are things you keep on book shelves not stacked in a box somewhere.
Since it's hard core readers who are doing all the pirating (This is a niche group with a specialized interest. If they're not downloading and sharing then they're scanning and uploading. It's a painstaking process to do correctly and not as simple as someone ripping CDs in their bedroom while running a file sharing program), you need to add features which will appeal to the hardcore.
Here's a thought. In an issue if someone (or the editors) reference something which happened in the past, lets say Bart Allen being beaten to death, I should be able to click on the speech bubble and go directly to the issue of The Flash where it happened. If it's an a-la-carte purchasing model they should offer to sell it to me as a download for a couple of bucks.
Do something like that and it's the long tail in action and it's something pirates can't offer as it's the publishers meta-data as a competitive weapon.
It's early days yet but just like all the other content folks I don't see the comic book industry getting the technology right. Content folks are the wrong people to come up with the distribution platform and that's why death, taxes and piracy are assured for as long as the planet keeps turning.
