A long time coming, you can now own the comics you buy from ComiXology.
"Cord cutting" is such a cool sounding phrase for people who have stepped away from the old model of television consumption and embraced stream services like Amazon Prime and Hulu Plus. A little while ago, I moved away from paper comics and embraced the sexy swipe of a digital reader -- we don’t have a cool term yet. Maybe someday we will, but for now, some might call me dim, because though I have a heaping ComiXology-based library full of carefully cultivated comics whose collective brilliance can only be understood by me, I also don’t.
I’m a renter, same as you are if your comic collection is housed on ComiXology, and that is because of their policy against DRM-Free comics that we could fully download and house on our devices, but those policies changed a couple of hours ago and now look how many comics we own. It’s like we won a damn sweepstakes prize.
Before you turn your eyes upwards in anticipation of falling balloons, though, we have to get to the “but” of this happy announcement. Yes, ComiXology will now allow consumers to simply download a DRM-Free backup copy of your purchases (as either a PDF or a CBZ file), but it will only work with select publishers. Those publishers are Image (who went DRM-Free last year), Thrillbent (ditto), Zenescope, Dynamite, Monkeybrain and Top Shelf (who has also dabbled in DRM-Free). Will other publishers follow suit? Who knows? It’s not follow the leader so much as it’s “follow the first one to not lose their shirt trying something new” in comics.
To be clear, I don’t think anyone is going to lose their shirt going DRM-Free (including the industry as a whole) and I’m both surprised that ComiXology changed course on this (CBR has a great interview ComiXology CEO David Steinberger on DRM vs DRM-Free from last year) and not surprised.
I imagine a lot of people will download these backups (which can be done by going to My Books and clicking the DRM-Free Backup button on applicable titles) and then they will never ever open these files. Others will ignore this completely and some will feel more secure about their purchases because they own them now.
For the sake of the latter group, this is worthwhile, and as ComiXology co-founder John D. Roberts said, “For those out there who have not joined the comic reading community because of DRM – you have no excuse now,”. So maybe this also brings in some newbies, though I’ve never known anyone who resisted comics because of DRM.
Personally, I’m in favor of this because I’m a big believer in the principle of, “Here is my money, where is my crap?!”, but overall, I imagine that the option to do this may stand as some kind of security blanket for people more than it will be a thing that they actually do. I’ll probably be one of those people.
Here’s CEO David Steinberger on why they decided to make this change (via CBR):
"We do this 'Ask Us Anything' -- we have done it for many years -- and inevitably, a question every year is, 'Why is there DRM on my book? I want to own it,' [...] My answer has always been that it is more important to get all the publishers on board than to do DRM-free. The experience was going to be, you don't have to have stacks of hard drives, you don't have to load a file onto your computer… We decided it wasn't where we were going to put our development resources, given that no publisher of note wanted to do it. It's just the right time. Image started offering DRM-free, Top Shelf been doing it for a while -- I just felt like I couldn't sit up here and answer that question any more with a straight face. It's the publisher's choice, it's bare bones, we are not going to teach you how to load a CBZ file into comiXology. We don't expect you to do it. At the same time, people want it, publishers are doing it, it seems like the right thing to do. … I hope you enjoy your backup, [but] our plan is we are always going to be the place where you buy and read your comics."
Stay tuned to Den of Geek for all things SDCC 2014.
Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for all news updates related to the world of geek. And Google+, if that's your thing!