Emanata: What’s a Digital Comic Book Worth?

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Transferable property. You can lend it or give a printed comic book to a friend. If you decide you don’t want it any more, you may be able to get some of your initial investment back, and maybe even all or more, by selling it to a willing buyer for a mutually acceptable price.

Durability. One of the genuinely wonderful things about comics culture is its sense of history: the work of preserving this medium and everything attached to it is distributed among tens of thousands of collectors, and as easy as it is to make fun of bags and boards and boxes, they do what they’re supposed to do in the long term. The digital comics DC and other publishers are selling right now require the mediation of comiXology’s reader to even look at them–which means that they’re only a couple of business failures or technological upgrades away from vanishing. How many files in proprietary formats that you acquired ten years ago can your computer still even open?

(More on Techland: DC Comics Partners With comiXology and PlayStation, Will Offer Day and Date Books)

Scarcity. I’ve written about the scarcity delusion that fuels the direct market before, and collectors tend to seriously overestimate the scarcity of comics. But there will only ever be so many printed copies of Captain Maximum Vs. the Red Basher #3 out there, and that can make it more desirable. The supply of any given digital comic, on the other hand, is theoretically inexhaustible.

The meaning that accrues to physical objects. That sounds kind of woo-woo, but think of it this way. Which would you rather have: a printed copy of Amazing Spider-Man #50, from 1967, or Marvel Tales #190, which reprinted it in 1986? The Marvel Tales reprint is almost certainly “scarcer,” technically, but the original printing has more of a historical aura, which makes it more desirable. But now let’s say that that issue of Marvel Tales is inscribed to you by Stan Lee and John Romita. Now which would you rather have? What about if the Amazing Spider-Man issue had been given to you by your partner when you were first dating? Are there any of those that you would rather have than a comiXology digital file of “Spider-Man No More”? What if your partner had given you that file–whoops, no, files in proprietary formats are nontransferable, forget I mentioned that.

When you buy digital comics, on the other hand, you get one very big thing you don’t get with printed comics:

Convenience. You get the work in question immediately, without having to travel anywhere or interact with anyone else, and in a form that you can keep around, at least for a while, without a flapping piece of paper attached. Don’t knock convenience: it’s a powerful motivator, and it’s worth a significant amount of money in practice. In the coming months, we’re going to find out how much.

Want more Emanata? See all of Douglas’ columns here.

More on Techland:

Marvel’s Doctor Is In… For A Big-Screen Debut?

Talking Digital Comics With ComiXology’s David Steinberger

Beach Reading! Techland’s Summer Comics Preview

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