The Egatz Epitaph

Although I hung up my comics collecting before junior high, there’s been some very interesting buzz about the future of the business. BusinessWeek ran this story about an early iPad adopting publishing subgenre: comic book publishers.

Disney-owned Marvel let loose their comic book application at the launch of the iPad. It enables sales of 500 and growing Marvel titles. Use of fingers to page through is standard fare. At just under two bucks a title, more trees continue to live, and you don’t have be embarrassed browsing titles along side nine year olds in brick and mortar locations.

Disney paid $4.3 billion for Marvel, so it’s fair to assume they’re not going to buy and shelf the brand. That is, they’re actually spending money on new vehicles and technologies to get their product before new readers. This time, for instance, they’ve paid Iconology/ComiXology to do some fancy Cocoa programming for the iPad.

Even with Apple taking 30% off the top for distribution, that still beats physical distribution, plus mortar stores’ cut of the retail price, plus costs of physical printing, etc. With ICv2 claiming $715 million in 2008 Canadian and American sales, that’s reason enough to get on the iPad e-comic ship. With great power comes great responsibility. With great technology comes great innovation. With great sales comes great motivation.