New page in progress as the team monitors life in Burma

“Digital vs. Print” .. I’m one of those that loves both, since the content is the real issue and the only thing to debate here is the delivery method. I do greatly prefer print in the same way I prefer print books over e-reader books, but that largely has to do with me enjoying reading outdoors with the feel of paper in my hands. Objectively, each has its advantages as listed below. I was surprised myself by the comparison, in which digital has almost every advantage for the future of comics.

Portability
This was always a big advantage of print until the iPad and slew of upcoming tablet devices made digital comics a more viable option. At anywhere from 7-10” in height, they aren’t as bulky as laptops and make it far easier than print to take books with you wherever you go. Smaller devices like the PSP and iPhone work surprisingly well for reading comics on the go, but I’m leaving them out of the debate due to their smaller display size vs. print comics. The one issue where portability of course is lacking is in the ages-old custom of trading comics and books and leaving them with friends/relatives, which will come up again later. This lack of sharing is my biggest pet peeve with digital media.

Pricing
Here’s an area where the digital advantage isn’t necessarily being reflected in what consumers are being charged in some places. The costs of print beyond creative talent are in part: Print-house costs, paper costs, and distribution costs (Diamond doesn’t distribute comics for free ya know). So in addition to not having to rely on Diamond, comics done digitally get away from paper, whose price fluctuations have been blamed for most print comics price increases over the years. How it is then that digital comics are at times priced equal to or above print comics is beyond me.
In addition, pricing of the device to VIEW digital comics on a tablet device remains absurdly high compared to you know.. your eyes. An iPad will cost you around 500 bucks on average, and other viewing devices like your computer have their own price point. Obviously these aren’t exclusively dedicated to comic viewing, but perhaps some of the larger companies like Marvel can starts selling $200.00 “bundled” iPads with subscriptions to all of their content for a certain amount of time? The “discounted hardware with subscriptions” plan seems to be working okay for those cell phone companies.

Coloring Flexibility
Digital wins here easily. Those who haven’t worked in comics probably are not aware of the limitations of print as it relates to color reproduction. Basically every version of Photoshop has something built in called “gamut” warning which warns you when your RGB colors are drifting into unprintable mode. Everything you see in the below pic that’s ‘gray’ was actually a heavily saturated color, which PS turns to gray to tell you it won’t print as well as it appears on screen. The second image is what you see on your screen, which is the image as it was meant to be seen. For this reason colorists often work in CMYK mode, which features a smaller range of colors but doesn’t allow non-printable colors.

Features
Digital easily wins again here. I, like a lot of 80s kids, poured over the letters columns in my favorite comics. The reality is these were replaced by far superior creator-run forums. You don’t have to worry about paying for 2 extra pages of print (although I still love the letter column in BPRD for example) when you can have an entire website to handle feedback and allow interaction among fans. This also replaces the need for things like sourcebooks and trading cards. I like “motion comics” for what they are, but won’t include them here b/c they aren’t really comics (future post).

Target Audience
No question here. For those of us who are longtime collectors the comic store is great. It’s fun to go debate books with local folks who also collect, and the conversations are way more civil than what you find online typically. But the reality is that anything constrained so heavily by geography and built to service a niche market limits potential audiences. In addition, thanks to the magic of analytics (Google’s is outstanding), you can trace your purchasing audience to a much more precise degree than you ever could with print, and let your advertising dollars be used accordingly.

Collectibles
Not to go on too long of a tangent, but essentially both the music industry and video game industry hate used disc sales b/c they allow new customers to own a product without the producing company getting any of the money. Garth Brooks sued Wherehouse Music over it. Comics can be resold especially in trade format with sites like ebay and amazon. Hard-to-find books can go for huge markups over cover price, unless of course it’s digital. Print wins in every way here, but note that this has nothing to do with actual content.

Indy Artists
Diamond has completely control over whether or not books are distributed in print. This is replaced for the iPad by Apple which completely controls distribution through its iTunes portal, so this is a wash until other viable storefronts become available.

As a fan of both methods of delivery, my biggest frustration remains the either/or perspective. If you want to help print retailers, how about giving them kiosks with all the digital versions so people can browse books without opening the print copies. Or how about allowing people to use their barcode from purchased print books to get a free digital versions (similar to what DVD companies are doing with included digital copies.) I love comic stores, but let’s stop pretending everyone does.