ComiXology Has Made Some Changes – and They’re Not Good
ComiXology, the long-time digital comic book marketplace, has revamped its app and webpage. Some for the better, but mostly for the worse.
ComiXology started as an independent app. It was purchased by Amazon in 2014. Most of the userbase braced for the influence of a new corporate overload with an existing marketplace. That didn’t come at the time and most users, myself included, were fine with what we had.
What We Had Was Great
ComiXology is the go-to place to buy comics online. It is the best place to get everything you are looking for and they treated Wednesday like new comic book day. I’m personally wrapped up in the Google Ecosystem and was ready to jump to Play when they added digital comics to their book store, but because the features were lacking, I stayed with ComiXology.
via Amazon
Their Unlimited service is excellent, offering a wealth of available comics to read for a small subscription price. It also offers a discount on most publishers for any comic you buy. It is easily the best subscription I have these days, as it pays itself back in discounts and comics I can pull from the library and try out without having to buy them.
Both web and app made it easy to access the library you purchased and borrowed, sorted by series. You can subscribe to series and stop having to keep track of when something comes out. All of this was available in the US and internationally. Publishers who allowed DRM free downloads of their comics were facilitated in the ComiXology store.
ComiXology Changes
Well, on Thursday, a lot of what ComiXology did so well changed.
via Amazon
New comics Wednesday? Nope, for the most part, if you aren’t in the featured new titles list it is near impossible to find your new comic. Subscription functionality outside the US? Nope, per Amazon and ComiXology, this feature is not currently available.
DRM free downloads? Not anymore, this feature has been suspended. Unlimited is still as good as it ever was, but it will be merging with Kindle Unlimited in ways that aren’t entirely clear yet. Hopefully, it will remain a great value.
There are also changes like the online store and app no longer allow you to put your purchases in a shopping cart.
Everything must be purchased using 1-Click. This means if you are like many comic book readers, you will end up with as many e-mails and single charges to your debit/credit card as there were comics you bought. I personally am concerned about how my credit card company will handle that.
Last but not least, the online reader went from an incredible experience that allowed easy zooming and user-friendly features to… something far less.
Pages are static. In some cases, readers have reported that simple things like 2-page spreads are no longer available. There is no ability to match the size of the comic to the window. Everything is static, often leading to massive white space all around the comic you are attempting to read. Amy Dallen detailed this perfectly on Twitter:
Dear God.
This is a disaster. Comixology’s reader is going away, so as of next week here are my options to read comics on desktop. There is no two-page view. There is no zoom. I have not altered these pictures aside from markup.AdvertisementWitness the work of the great J. H. Williams III. pic.twitter.com/8rFzaOSO16
— Amy Dallen (@enthusiamy) February 12, 2022
It’s Not All Bad
On the app, at least, the reader is much better. It isn’t nearly as user-friendly as it once was, with Guided View (being able to zoom from narrative moment to narrative moment on each page) gone, but the speed and general smoothness of the app are drastically improved. What was a frustrating experience, namely navigating my library, is completely butter smooth. I can filter the list dynamically using options like Author, Artist, Series, and Publisher.
via Amazon
The app is miles ahead of where it was before. I sometimes questioned if I had a good enough tablet because of just how poorly the ComiXology app performed. That is no longer the case. My underpowered Lenovo Duet Chromebook handled loading, sorting, and grouping my 3800 issue library in under 5 minutes, thumbnails downloaded and read/unread status included. I was impressed.
The Impact & How To Counter It
Overall, I think this is bad for the comics industry. The best place to buy new comics, which made it easy to buy new comics every week has gone the way of the Kindle store. I no longer buy physical copies for a lot of reasons (limited physical space being the main one) and digital is my preferred avenue for consumption. ComiXology just made that harder to do.
I 100% do not advocate the piracy of comic books. The volume sold of comics these days is so small that our personal business and purchases matter greatly. But as we’ve seen in the past, when a legitimate business makes it harder to give you their money, piracy tends to increase. Don’t do it.
Life-long comics fan Patton Oswalt took to Twitter to register his complaints.
…I hope this all shakes out, that @amazon and @comixology hear these concerns and go back to their old model, which was PERFECT. And I REALLY hope this doesn’t hurt the smaller publishers, all of whom have been doing beyond stellar work these past few years.
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) February 18, 2022
Join him – yell and scream on Twitter and Facebook, and email [email protected]. Make sure they know you aren’t happy. Hopefully, it will make a dent. Let them know what to keep and what to change:
- The good: The app is butter smooth and makes it much easier to navigate. Unlimited (at least in the US) is still great, especially at the current price.
- The bad: Single purchase only, no cart. No subscription service for users outside the US. No intuitive or easy-to-use library features on desktop. New comics Wednesday is no longer a thing. A user-friendly reader is dead in favor of something that is objectively worse.
Hopefully, the complaints of loyal users along with press coverage will get them to change the most egregious problems.
