This is not manga, but it’s relevant to our lives: Newsarama has an interview with Josh Blaylock, who has just unveiled a comics download service called Pullbox Online. What impresses me is his attitude: “simple simple simple.”
Everyone’s trying to make everything too complicated with special animation on the balloons, animated “page turning” features, etc. If someone wants to see animated content, there’s a hell of a lot more places to go online for that. People who are downloading comics just want to read a comic, not be distracted by something that makes the reading experience more complicated.
To that end, the site is offering both PDF and CBR format without a lot of bells and whistles. And he’s not loading the comics down with a lot of copy-protection either:
We are not going to overload the site with tedious DRM features. After a lot of consideration and study, it was decided that it’s more important for Pullbox to be the easiest place to download a comic. We want to embrace the currently existing online community of downloaders, not exclude them. Most of these communities are looking for a cheap legal alternative and we’re providing it.
People are already sending them around via scans from print comics, so if they’re determined to do that they’re going to do it anyway. And to be frank, if Pullbox can sell 10,000 downloads of a title and reach a new audience, we don’t care if 100,000 people are reading that same product. That will just make us try to get the circulation up to 1,000,000 so we can be selling 100,000 downloads.
Blaylock goes on to point out that this is how iPod overcame the Napster crowd. A lot of comics on the site (which, to be honest, are not my cup of tea) are 99 cents, which tells me that he really is serious about emulating that model. And without printing and distribution costs, he can still do OK at that price point.
It almost sounds like he read Queenie Chan’s posts on e-anthologies (part one here, part two here) and took them to heart.
Check the comments for some good points of view on how this will work. But disregard the guy who complains that the content is crap—that’s not the point. If this catches on, the content will improve with dizzying speed.
UPDATE: Johanna has more.
