How Amazon Destroyed Digital Comics
The digital giant’s push to force comics into their store may have crippled an industry
In 2008, when I left America for Japan, it was with the solemn understanding that I would have to sacrifice the American comics I’d been collecting for almost my entire life. The best I could hope for is buying graphic novels online and having them shipped over.
Then came ComiXology and a revolutionary approach to digital comics.
Granted, digital comics had existed in some nascent forms before then. Marvel at one point released several collections of comics on CD-ROMs. But they were essentially just poor scans and reading comics at full-size on a computer screen is nowhere near as natural as reading a physical comic.
ComiXology created their Guided View system, which would allow readers to seamlessly transition from one zoomed-in portion of the page to another. The image quality was very good, and the system was simple and easy to use.
Browsing the ComiXology store was a pleasant experience. The comics were beautifully arranged in a grid view, easily separated into several different categories. And the frequent ComiXology sales had such great offerings that you felt like an idiot if you didn’t take advantage of them.
ComiXology made it very easy to not only find what you were looking for, but also to discover new titles, creators, and publishers. They would regularly spotlight independent comics in their sales, which allowed me to find wonderful titles like The Wrong Earth. Subscribing to books was easier than ever, with just a simple ticking of a box.
And when viewing lists of books, ComiXology would give you a very simple “Add to Cart” button or remind you of a book you already had with “View in Library.”
I went from not purchasing any comics when I left for Japan to spending upwards of $100 a month on digital comics.
Then Amazon came along and bought ComiXology outright.
For the longest time, Amazon was pretty hands-off with ComiXology. Other than removing the option to make in-app purchases from iOS devices like they do with their own app, Amazon didn’t screw with ComiXology too much. They also allowed comics purchased on the Amazon website to be accessed in ComiXology, which was a great touch.
But all that changed recently when Amazon rolled out their massive changes to the ComiXology store. Amazon and ComiXology had been touting their “team-up” for some time with banners on their websites and apps, urging users to link their ComiXology and Amazon accounts.
And then when they released the update, it broke an industry overnight.
The new store layout is terrible
The old ComiXology store with its beautiful interface and easy navigation was gone. Now going to comixology.com simply redirects you to the Kindle Comics store on Amazon’s website.
The sidebar (which was never on ComiXology’s sales page) is distracting and adds clutter. When looking at the books on sale, there is no longer a convenient “Add to Cart” button. I own some of these books, but I can’t even see which ones are already in my library. Instead, I have to click on each individual book, and even then, the only option is 1-click buy.
On the old ComiXology site, when you viewed all the books on sale in a category, you would still see them in that pleasant grid layout. The books were also well-organized: the most-popular graphic novels would be listed front and center, then all graphic novels organized alphabetically and by volume number, and finally, you’d have single issues. All marked with either a clear “Add to Cart” button or notifying you that you already owned it.
Here’s what looking at the current Batman sales page looks like:
The only option is now an ugly list view. The only sort options are featured, lowest to highest price, highest to lowest price, and publication date. No organization like ComiXology used to use.
I own some of the books on this page. Can you tell which ones I own? No? Neither can I. Again, I have to click on each individual book and go to the page to see if I already own it. And if the book is in Kindle Unlimited, I don’t even have a 1-click buy option—I have to go to the book page to find that button.
Before, I would frequently browse the ComiXology sales pages and click “Add to Cart” on any book that caught my interest so I could investigate it more later. This actually led to me purchasing a lot more books than I had intended to.
But now with all those extra steps? I’m actually spending more time considering whether or not to choose 1-click buy. Especially because clicking that button takes me off the sales page.
In the past, a sale like this meant I probably would have picked up at least five to seven graphic novels, if not more. But I got so frustrated trying to browse this sale that I eventually left the site without making a buy.
Now let’s have a look at the library.
Reading digital comics is now a chore
The old ComiXology library was great to browse either on a mobile device or a computer. Everything was easily sorted by title and you also had helpful Smart Lists that told you with a glance which books were in-progress, which books you recently purchased, and which ones were unread. This was the same on both desktop and mobile.
Those Smart Lists are gone. In the app, you have to click to choose those different views instead of having them ready at a glance. But the app at least allows you to sort by series.
Unfortunately, that’s not true of the browser.
Viewing your comic library on the ComiXology browser site was very easy. You just log in and then you had a “My Books” link right at the top. One click and there you are.
Now getting to your library from the Amazon homepage after you log in requires you to hover over Account and Orders, click on Content and Devices, click on Books, then it will show all your titles, so you have to choose next to View and select “ComiXology” and then you get this view:
Wow, that’s pretty terrible. There’s a slightly better view, but you can’t access it from the Amazon page. Instead, you have to go to read.amazon.com in order to access your library in the browser. And then you get this:
Okay, better. But no smart lists, no series grouping, no sort by read/unread, not even a little mark showing you which of these books you have or haven’t read.
I’m not sure how this compares to the Kindle desktop app. I would check, but I’m a Mac user and Amazon’s Kindle For Mac has been broken for years. Every time I open it, it crashes instantly. Amazon has known about this problem for years and still hasn’t bothered to fix it.
Now for the browser reading experience.
A comics experience designed by people who have never read comics
Here is what it looks like when you open a comic on the Kindle Cloud Reader:
That’s it. No option for single or double-page spreads, no options for turning Guided View on or off, just the two pages set right there.
So how does Guided View work here? Look at this next image.
No, that’s not the same image. That’s Guided View. I had to double-click on that speech bubble to turn it on and that’s how close it zoomed in.
Here’s another example:
This time, it actually did zoom in on a single panel. But it left the second page in full. And there’s no easy transition to the next GV element. I have to double-click to turn it on, double-click to go back to the whole page, then double-click on the next part to zoom in again. Goodbye, smooth transitions.
Guided View on browsers may as well be non-existent.
What about the app?
The app is slightly better. Guided View still works there (for now). However, the new ComiXology app is still worse than the old version. Again, no Smart Lists.
Guided View is no longer as smooth in the app. With the old app, you had the option of whether you wanted to view single or double-pages. That option’s gone. At first, reading in landscape mode meant you’d see two pages, portrait mode gave you one. That seems to have changed, but now whether it works depends on the book you’re reading.
Some books have the page fill the screen (in landscape mode, this means you can’t see the whole page). Some books will show the whole page. And some will only display in portrait mode, a little chink I found with two titles. Even locking rotation on landscape mode wouldn’t work and the books still forced the app to rotate back to portrait mode.
Suffice to say, these problems never existed on the old app.
What Amazon has essentially done is reskinned their Kindle app with the ComiXology logo and color scheme. Nothing of the old ComiXology app remains.
The Kindle app is fine…for books. Comics and prose books are not the same thing. They’re two very different mediums. This is a principle so obvious, it shouldn’t even have to be stated…and yet, it’s one that nobody at Amazon seems aware of.
Forcing the Kindle app on comics just makes for a terrible experience.
Need help? Good luck!
I contacted Amazon about these problems. Their response was that although ComiXology is owned by Amazon, it’s “operated independently” and I should contact ComiXology support.
The only option to contact ComiXology support is now through an email address: support@comixology.com. So I sent ComiXology an email last week. I still haven’t received a response.
Not only has Amazon broken the app, but they’ve refused to take any responsibility. Instead, they direct users to an email address that apparently isn’t even monitored.
Subscriptions for international users are gone
If you live outside the US, getting comics is very difficult. We don’t have local comics shops and shipping costs on graphic novels is prohibitively expensive. ComiXology has been a wonderful way for us who have moved abroad and want to continue reading comics or for other people to discover comics. I was able to get some of my Japanese students into American comics thanks to ComiXology.
But now it’s more difficult. If you had subscriptions before and you lived outside the US? Sorry, those subscriptions are now gone and there’s no word on when or even if they’ll ever be reinstituted.
Little competition for readers of the Big Two
ComiXology has been a godsend for people who want to read comics but don’t have access to a local comic shop. And while there are other digital comics stores, such as Global Comix, these are limited only to indie books.
If you want Marvel books, this update doesn’t seem to have damaged their version of the ComiXology interface. But unfortunately, the app requires some work to get on a Kindle Fire tablet.
If you’re a DC Comics fan and you live overseas, you are completely out of luck. For no logical reason I can see, the DC Comics app is only available in the US. Your only option if you live overseas is to create a new profile for iTunes or Google Play in the US, fund it with gift cards, and (possibly) use a VPN.
We need more competition for digital comics.
What this means for the industry
For many years, the comics industry was facing a crisis. A shrinking readership and slavish devotion to the direct market made it more difficult to bring in new readers.
Digital comics has helped save the industry and opened it up to a larger world of customers. While calls to support your local comics shop are noble, not everyone has an LCS. Fortunately for those in the US, you can still purchase physical comics from online comic shops with low or zero shipping costs.
This isn’t an option for international comics fans. The shipping costs on physical books are astronomical, often dwarfing the costs of the books themselves. Digital has been our only option.
Since Amazon broke ComiXology, I’ve seen a lot of users on Twitter talking about how they’re going back to pirating comics. I myself won’t be doing that, nor is it something I endorse. But the frustration is understandable. Far more likely is that people will just get so frustrated using the new ComiXology that they stop reading comics altogether.
This update is bad for the industry, bad for customers, and it’s ultimately bad for Amazon’s bottom line. There is literally not one single benefit that came out of this update. Every single thing about it has been a downgrade.
ComiXology has promised updates to address these issues, which of course misses the point: the old store and app worked perfectly. The simplest thing to do would be to just go back to the old versions.
But I don’t have faith that Amazon is smart enough to admit to that mistake. Instead, we’re likely to just see some cosmetic changes that will not make the app or website operate as well as they once did.
ComiXology as we know it is likely dead. And Amazon killed it.
