Comics | Good E-Reader - ebook Reader and Digital Publishing News

Archive for comics

Marvel Comics will begin giving free digital codes away with the purchase of any comic valued at $3.99 starting this June. This will correlate with the launch of the X-Men VS. The Avengers saga which will play out until the end of the year.

When you purchase a new comic from your local shop or bookstore there will be a digital code inside that you can redeem. Currently only the official Marvel App for Android and iOS are supported, which accounts for a hefty amount of their digital revenue.

Marvel is no stranger to digital codes and tested the waters over the course of last year with giving them away with purchase of most “Ultimates” comic books. The company is banking that traditional buyers of books in the stores will gravitate towards the online offerings.

We’re committed to bringing fans the best value in comics. By including codes for free digital copies in all our $3.99 super hero comics, we’re doing just that” said David Gabriel, SVP of Sales, Marvel Entertainment. “We’ve seen a tremendous response to the digital codes in Avenging Spider-Man, our Season One graphic novels and the Ultimate Comics line. The positive reactions from both retailers and fans make it clear that including these codes with our books drives customers into comic stores on a repeated basis.”

Have you ever wanted to develop and distribute your own comic book? Many talented artists the world over want to create the next Batman or Wolverine and now your dream is closer to reality. San Francisco based comic book company Graphicly has developed a new set of tools that will make the process of creating and distributing comic books easier than ever.

Graphicly currently markets its comic books to many platforms, which makes aspiring artists and writers tap into a large ecosystem. iBooks, Kobo, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Android are the main stores the company peddles its wares to. It even has the ability to embed your comic into an HTML5 compliant stream that can be displayed on your own blog or website. Graphicly offers authors and publisher the ability to select the type of distribution they need, as well as the revenue model that best suits them, from a basic free offering to a flat rate per conversion and a number of options in between. Web and Facebook posting via the self-service platform are free, with other platforms and services requiring additional commitment.

“Over the past few years, the team at Graphicly identified an unmet need in the digital publishing industry for automated tools to convert, distribute, and promote image-based content,” said Micah Baldwin, Graphicly founder and CEO. “By opening up our proven digital distribution platform, we now provide these services, while giving authors and publishers full control of their content and revenue streams and a deep understanding of how readers are engaging with their content. We believe our customer’s books should be available in every marketplace imaginable, with the knowledge and support to properly market and promote them.”

The full suite of self-publishing tools will be available to officially roll-out in the next few weeks and we will keep you appraised of the situation.


comic books

Authors of comic books and graphic novels have long relied on the concept of the ashcan print, a brief book of about sixteen pages or so that will illustrate for the distributor what the author/illustrator team can do. This small effort is the necessary foot in the door to be able to go on to produce lengthier works. It can be likened to a query for fiction writers trying to catch the attention of a literary agent or publishing house.

While many writers of both fiction and non-fiction have been able to enjoy the benefits of the digital world, whether by submitting manuscripts to agents in e-reader-compatible format for consideration for traditional publishing, or establishing themselves as self-published authors with a small-but-growing loyal following of readers, the electronic age has not caught up as readily with the needs of graphic novelists.

Rob Graham, author of Keeper of the Gate, a dark horror adult fiction with crossover potential for young adult readers, started out in publishing with comic books and graphic novels but quickly discovered that the new routes opening to authors interested in self-publishing, especially the ability to format a manuscript for e-readers and sell it through online retailers, hasn’t quite caught up with graphic novels.

A quick glance through the reader reviews on Amazon’s Kindle store under any given randomly selected graphic novel title is that the drawings are just too poor to come through on Kindle. Many commentators, however, were quite pleasantly surprised as they were perhaps a little low in their expectations on how the graphics would format to the e-reader.

However, with the literally hundreds of thousands of Kindle titles available, only just over four thousand graphic novels are available for the Kindle e-reader, and about seventy-eight titles were listed under the search, “comics books for kids.” A typical juvenile comic book consumer owns more than that by the time he’s old enough to pick up an e-reader.

One of the complaints from reviewers spoke to the inability of the text to come through. The formatting of that particular title required the reader to zoom in and then arrow over to every block, which would be like traditional comic book or graphic novel readers needing to run a handheld magnifying glass over every page in order to read the text and see the complete artwork.

A search through the Nookstore didn’t turn up any digital graphic novels, which is surprising given that the Nook Color advertises such a high-graphics capability and offers many kids books with full-color illustrations, meaning the mechanism is there but that the market hasn’t caught up.

And until that interest and technology can catch up, authors like Rob Graham are left shifting their focus to the storytelling aspect of their craft, abandoning the cutting-edge art that so often defines the genius of a graphic novelist in order to bring to life at least one part of who he is as a writer: just the words.

Kindle can now read comics

Here is something that will put the Kindle in the same league as the iPad. Its true both the devices are as diverse as chalk is from cheese. Sure the iPad can also be an e-reader though its e-book reading credentials is just one of the many things that the tablet PC is capable of. The Kindle, on the other hand is purely an e-reader and every bit of the e-reader is optimized for a superior e-reading experience.

Still, the Kindle was not without its limitations as an e-reader (the iPad too is not without faults) and was never known to be able to read comics, something that the iPad was able to by way of a plethora of comic reading apps while its color screen too acted as a boon.

But not any more, thanks to an open-source software tool Mangle. Which means, the black and white comics like the Scott Pilgrim series along with most other Manga work is now Kindle ready.

Created by FooSoft’s Alex Yatsov, the Mangle is a cross between the Manga and the Kindle with Manga contributing ‘Mang’ and Kindle adding the ‘le’ to it to give rise to Mangle and is excellent in rendering comic images on to the Kindle in the right order and allignment.

Categories : e-reader, e-Reader News
Comments (5)