Change is hard. But when it’s the largest platform for digital comics, it can be even harder. The long-awaited Comixology full integration with Amazon Marketplace arrived last week, removing the dedicated Comixology storefront. Now, all purchases go through Amazon’s main site, and work similarly to Kindle purchases. The main Comixology app also got a new look, similar to the Kindle app on the iPad.
Of course, a major change like this leads to some strong opinions, so we convened a few staff members to discuss their feelings on seeing this change finally live, after months of discussion and speculation. Turn and face the strange ch-ch-changes with us!
What’re your first impressions of the new interfaces?
Andrea Ayres: Oh I don’t like it. No. I used the Kindle Cloud Reader on my laptop because I like pain, but even that was too much for me.
Nola Pfau: I wouldn’t know! I mean this is what I get when I try to read a book I purchased four years ago.
Anna Peppard: I also wouldn’t know. When I tried to log in to Comixology, it took me to Amazon, where I was told my Comixology books were “hidden.” To make them visible, I was told to merge my Comixology and Amazon accounts and had to agree to import my purchases to Kindle. I did that and was told it might take “some time” for my books to show up. It’s been three days and none of the books I purchased through Comixology are showing up in Kindle on any of my devices, only one is showing in my Comixology app on Android, and my Amazon account says I own zero books. Guess I’ll keep waiting?
Kat Overland: I’d (reluctantly) merged my Amazon and Comixology accounts a while back and was thankfully able to actually get the app to update and run properly on my old Kindle Fire. The UI is similar but somehow…slightly worse and more cluttered, less streamlined, and it’s harder to find things in and I’m not convinced my entire library made it over.
Latonya Pennington: It’s mostly okay for me. The only minor issue I had was how the library seems more cluttered.
Carrie McClain: I’m still in the process of trying to “unhide” my books and get the ball rolling. After all the time, I’m STILL looking for the familiar Comixology website storefront and…it ain’t there. Honestly, everytime I go and try to figure things out, I get frustrated and go do something else.
How is the tablet reading experience?
Nola: Also bad! Functionally Kindle does technically do the guided panel reading that Comixology used to, but it’s buggy as hell—you’re as likely to drop into the standard Kindle reader mode as you are to advance to the next panel. Also, it’s not updating libraries properly. For reference, I synced my Amazon and Comixology logins a while back instead of just now, so functionally, my stuff should work, right?
However, this same book in the screenshot above, which clearly says I acquired it in June of 2018, is not in my Kindle library. When I hunt it down, even Kindle says I acquired it then, but still! I owned most of IDW’s Transformers offerings on Comixology, and none of them are in my Kindle library. It’s extremely frustrating that I have to go hunt them down one by one in the storefront if I want to read them. My accounts were already synced! They should just be there!
Kat: I didn’t have too many problems with actually reading in the new Comixology app, but I also don’t use guided panel reading.
Latonya: Guided view seemed a bit sensitive at first because I either couldn’t use it or it worked slowly. After a few days, it worked normally again.
What are some of the worst changes?
Kat: The pay! Amazon is now taking an even greater cut of digital-only sales. While previous Comixology Submit creators are somewhat grandfathered in and able to keep their 50/50 split. newer creators are facing not only a 65/35 split on digital sales (in favor of Amazon), they also have lost the support of Comixology in terms of formatting comics, setting up the guided view, and optimizing them for the apps. (Shoutout to Jodie Troutman for going over this with me!). Plus, Amazon doesn’t appear to have cleaned up any of the now-dead links pointing to creator pages on Comixology, often a top Google result for indie folks.
Andrea: The lack of communication or forethought that seemingly went into this or rather…didn’t. People who don’t engage with that *always online* life had no idea where all of their comics went. Explaining it to people and watching them go through the five stages of grief in a matter of moments was really something to behold. Most people got stuck in the anger phase though.
Nola: The lack of options! When Spotify screwed up a bit ago, we had other services (ironically, among them Amazon Music). There isn’t another catch-all digital comics service out there. There are individual storefronts for each publisher, but that’s a nightmare. This is Amazon’s goal, of course—if another marketplace like Comixology came about, Amazon would just slash their prices and drive it out of business.
Kate Kosturski: Getting forced into one-click buying with Amazon’s marketplace. The cart functionality allows you to fill up your cart with All The Comics And Manga You Could Want and then pare down to fit your budget. Now, each comic is its own transaction – my normal single Comixology order last week was six Amazon Kindle orders. And if you’re putting them on a credit card, that’s interest charges for each purchase, no matter how large or small.
I do want to point out two glaring errors that appear to have been fixed since day one launch. Several folks noticed that the credits for title listing in the Amazon store weren’t as robust as they were on Comixology but I have noticed they’re back to what we expected there – cover artist, colorist, etc. And some serious search result errors are also fixed. When I did a search for “wonder woman” in with the “comics, manga, and graphic novels” filter on day one of launch, the results included two Wonder Woman Apple Watch bands as the first two results (nice, but not what I’m after here) before getting to actual comics. Now, when I did a search a few days later (February 21st, 2022) the comics show up front and center. So Amazon is improving things, but it’s still a long way from what it used to be.
Kat: Glad to hear there’s been some cleanup on the data-side because Amazon has never been great about listing out all the creators for comics even before this online merging.
Latonya: The fact that I can’t see discounted digital comic books on the app store front anymore.
Let’s talk ramifications!
Kat: At least a decade of dead links left on comics blogs everywhere is a bummer, but I think the lack of a Comixology Submit option — moving everyone into the Kindle Direct Publishing funnel — is going to have a serious impact on indie comic sales and discoverability.
Nola: On a personal level, I am that much more motivated to own comics physically again. I cannot trust this system, I don’t care what deals Amazon offers. What’s the point of buying things on a sale if you can’t even trust you’ll have them later?
Anna: The ramifications for me as an educator are potentially huge. When I first started teaching comics and culture courses at the university level back in 2013, we reproduced a lot of the comics we taught in “course packs.” Basically: students had to buy black and white photocopies of Amazing Fantasy #15 and Giant-Size X-Men #1, which the school also had to pay Marvel for the privilege of reproducing. The alternative was assigning expensive trade paperback collections of comics that limited the diversity of what we could teach. Ideally, you want to teach superhero comics from the Golden Age by assigning a selection of comics from the period, rather than limiting yourself to a trade of early Superman or Wonder Woman comics.
The increasing availability of digital comics was a game-changer. It meant I could teach high-quality, color versions of a wider variety of older comics while significantly lowering material costs for students. By 2018, I’d gone completely digital, with a course website that included links to purchase comics from Comixology. In any large class, there are always a few technical hiccups, but for the most part, using Comixology in my teaching practice worked great. Unless they improve the functionality of the current interface for desktop and make it easier to view comics across different devices and operating systems, I’m not sure what I’ll do moving forward. Marvel Unlimited is available in Canada (where I am), but DC Infinite isn’t, and the Marvel app also doesn’t support desktop these days. Plus, I taught indie books through Comixology that I can’t get on the Big Two’s platforms.
To put it bluntly: anything that makes digital comics less accessible or practical will mean fewer people paying for comics. People will be driven to piracy sites, which is bad for everyone–creators, companies, and readers. That’s why these developments are so perplexing.
Carrie: In recent years, I’ve been buying and reading more manga on the site and I’ve appreciated and benefitted from all the great sales on first volumes and single chapters to keep my physical manga book shelves at home from not being overwhelmed! Comixology was where I bought new chapters of A Sign of Affection, one of the BEST ongoing shoujo manga series at the moment. Sure I pre-ordered the collected physical volumes when they came out but reading the newest chapters, fresh from Japan, was always, always a treat.
I usually read the chapter first using the Azuki app on my phone, but buy the chapter on Comixology so I can read later on a bigger device like my Kindle tablet or my desktop computer at home. This is such a blow to comics readers of all kinds, including those who love manga as this is just another way to push people into not legally supporting manga creators and publishers.
And I will say manga licensing can be wonky at times so seeing in recent years that slightly older classics that are out of print, such as Josei faves of mine like Tramps Like Us by Yayoi Ogawa and Mars by Fuyumi Soryo were living new lives thanks to digital releases thanks to ComiXology Originals and Kodansha Comics. This was such a great move as more and more people are reading digitally and manga sales are not excluded from that…Not every manga lover reads the Shonen Jump app or finds everything that they want on there. Discovering that there are less avenues for people to easily find and digitally purchase manga, especially the older stuff, sours the milk for us all.
Andrea: Here’s a quote that summarizes my frustration with the development side of things from Apple Insider. “The Comixology app team promises that many of these issues will be addressed in future updates, but that doesn’t help users that are being forced to migrate now. There isn’t a timeline for further updates…”
There’s no timeline for when these issues will be fixed or even if they will. According to the FAQ, there’s no archive, there’s no Smart Lists. It’s just another long line of fuckups in the comics digital space, hell the publishing space in general, where people act first and consider the consequences second. You know what really busts my tits? The concept that all e-readers are interchangeable. You got one service? No biggy, just use another one, and another one, and another one. That sucks for a myriad of reasons but some of them I can ramble off the top of my head: different DRM for different publishers, different accessibility issues, different sync issues.
Using the new Amazon comics store page is cluttered. When we talk about user experiences, we have to consider what the individual’s intention is. When I was in the ComiXology app or storefront, my intention was clear. I was gunna read some comics, or buy some to read later. The storefront facilitated discovery and reading in a multitude of ways.
You could view comics by story arcs, genre, publisher, etc. There was single page view, double page view, guided view and so on. That’s not to mention the ability to buy from independent publishers in an easy way (along with the benefit of some DRM-free comics). All of this is to say it attempted to put at least some control in the readers hand in a way electronic book publishers do not normally afford us. That’s gone now.
Amazon’s new comics store experience is simply about purchasing items. Here’s what it looks like for me (yes, I’m looking at $80.00 clothes hampers, leave me alone):
See, my view is always directed towards my cart. It is hard to focus on any one cover because this visual organization makes my eyes go “oh, please, make it stop.” There is not enough space between the covers so all the beautiful cover art is just lost for me as a viewer.
When I want more information about a comic, that experience is even more disheartening:
For a visual medium, the visuals are the least important component of this page. It completely removes the dynamism of a cover. Amazon is treating comics like their prose books, and they aren’t.
Any time a website adds cruft, you are going to lose people. How many clicks does it take to purchase a comic or to find out more about it in a comic-friendly fashion? If anything, finding out more information about comics should be becoming more simple. This bums me out so bad.
Kate: Anna hints about this above, but a lack of Digital Rights Management (DRM) on titles is going to be problematic for librarians, educators, and anyone who wants to properly preserve their digital content. If Comixology had any plans about expanding into the educational market, those are all but squashed with removing the DRM.
As other folks have said above, this will move people more towards physical purchases, which could lead to a comic shop renaissance. That’s a good thing! But people also have limited physical space to store those comics, which may limit just how robust that physical renaissance is. People will return to physical comics, but will also be extremely budget-conscious. Big Two readers may just wait for their series to hit Marvel Unlimited or DC Universe, and indie comic fans will be dependent on what their stores offer – – which if you have a smaller shop, will shut some creators out.
I don’t think we’ll see another digital platform rise to challenge what Comixology offers, but I think we’ll see creators turn to alternative platforms: more Kickstarter, more Substack. And there may also be a rise in piracy as well. If there’s anyone that could make a challenge to Comixology, it would be something equivalent to what the academic community has in Sci-Hub: a shadow library of content that manages to exist (and has for over a decade!) while fending off lawsuits from major publishers.
Bishop V. Navarro: I worry about the repercussions both short-term and long-term for disabled folks and those high-risk for COVID. Not everyone is able to or comfortable with leaving their house to go to a local comic book shop, and some disabled people, for many reasons, prefer and need digital comics. Accessibility needs to be a priority in any new interface, and the new Comixology reader isn’t designed for it.
Any last thoughts?
Kat: I think what’s most frustrating about this entire thing is how little care Amazon put into a product with not only a dedicated user base, but also an incredible opportunity to scale up as the current manga boom shows no sign of stopping — you can tell they’re aware since now the app is “Comics & Manga.”
Carrie: I know that ease and convenience is totally a thing in this day and age with platforms and apps–I’m sad for people getting into comics and trying to get back into comics–I’ve shared the Comixology app with lots of folks over the years. If something is too clunky, too buggy, too difficult to use and/love, people can and will just drop it. I hate that something as beloved as Comixology has now seen better days. Any actual useful tool for comic readers, lovers and academics that goes gentle into that good night deserves a eulogy. Or at least us pouring out libations.
Anna: Over the years, as a fan, educator, and scholar, I’ve had many conversations with people about their “comics origin story”–how and when they started reading comics. Time and time again I hear some version of–“I always wanted to read comics, but didn’t know how to get them.” That’s essentially my story, too. I loved superhero comics as a teen but owned about 20 of them because the local comic book store was intimidating as heck and not especially convenient, being a 45-minute drive away. I didn’t truly get into comics until my early 20s with the rise of digital comics. (I also moved to a bigger city with a more accessible and less intimidating comic book store, but digital comics opened the door.)
I want more people to read comics. I also want a healthy comic book industry that pays creators what they deserve. To have those things, we need to make it easier for people to read comics legally. This feels like the opposite of that and it sucks.
Kate: A partnership with the largest online retailer in the world should logically expand your exposure and readership by leaps and bounds. In this case, it’s going to do just the opposite for everyone: readers, creators, publishers. It’s like rain on your wedding day. Or a free ride when you’re already there.
