Emanata: What’s a Digital Comic Book Worth?

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The most interesting element of DC’s announcement this week that they’re entering the digital-comics sales fray is that they’re trying out tiered pricing: selling individual full issues of serial comics for 99 cents, $1.99 or $2.99. The question of what a digital comic book is worth–and whether its value to a reader is correlated with the value of the same thing in print–is wide open right now. As proof of that, over at DC’s own site, you can download copies of Fables #1, The Losers #1, The Sandman #1 and The Unwritten #1 for free, in PDF form. Alternately, you can pay $1.99 for each of them on the DC/comiXology app. (To add to the confusion, Vertigo just published a $1 print edition of The Losers #1 in April.) So what’s the going rate?

There’s not a standard yet for how much money a name-brand digital comic commands, and part of the reason is that there’s a crucial distinction between what you as a customer are paying for and how that payment is actually allocated. The specifics of where your three or four dollars go for a new print comic book–editorial and production costs, risk, profit, the distribution chain, and so on–are semi-opaque, and publishers like to keep it that way. It’s safe to say, though, that half or more of the cover price goes to the retailer and distributor, and that another sizeable chunk of money goes to printing the comics and shipping them to distributors. The editorial costs of a print comic’s digital incarnation are identical, but its “duplication” and “shipping” costs are comparatively infinitesimal, and it’s a safe bet that the “middleman” costs are significantly less. (By way of comparison, the iTunes Store is reputed to collect about 35 cents on the dollar for music it sells.)

(More on Techland: DC’s Digital Participation For Creators: New Or Not?)

What you’re actually paying for, on the other hand–where the value resides–is different for physical and digital comics. Here’s how it breaks down. For both physical and digital comics, you’re paying for:

Access to the work itself. If you want to read the new issue of Justice League: Generation Lost on the day it’s released, one way to do that is to give somebody three dollars for it.

The impression, true or false, that you are supporting the creators of particular work you enjoy –and that you are therefore encouraging more such work to be produced in the future. The idea of supporting a particular physical retail outlet, or alternately the idea of digital comics, might also enter into this calculus.

What you’re paying for when you buy a printed comic book that you don’t get with a digital comic:

(More on Techland: Reading the Tea Leaves: DC Goes Digital)

The work in its intended form (most of the time). The comiXology reader displays a single panel or two at a time of material that was drawn and composed as a page. There are very few comics currently available in America that were created to be viewed on a mobile phone; the effect is a bit like watching a View-Master reel of a dance performance. Greg Rucka and J.H. Williams III’s Batwoman stories are some of my favorite superhero comics in recent memory, but I suspect that reading them chopped up into individual panels would be painful.

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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