Batman Volume 4.jpg
Ah yes and here is the other shoe dropping: all of DC’s monthly comics will now be available on iVerse and backlist is coming.

While iVerse has been a distinct #2 player to ComiXology’s 800 lb. gorilla, the era of more digital choice seems to have begun. DC’s periodical comics are available many places—CX, Amazon Kindle Store, Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble Nook Store and Google Play—but only Comixology among comics only apps carried them. And we love all our pals at all digital companies, but a little competition is a good thing.
 

DC Entertainment, home to iconic Super Heroes including Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, announced today its current slate of monthly periodical comics are now available for download on iVerse Media’s ComicsPLUS App. Back catalog titles will be added to ComicsPLUS in the coming weeks and months.
 
“We want to be wherever comic fans are building their libraries and this new partnership with iVerse Media brings bestselling DC Entertainment titles from DC Comics and Vertigo to a broad, new digital audience,” stated Senior Vice President of Sales and Business Development, Derek Maddalena. “The fantastic new features in the ComicsPLUS app, paired with our iconic characters like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, deliver a great digital reading experience.”
 
The newly-updated ComicsPLUS 8.0 app includes several key features including a new “uView” enhanced reading experience, enhanced search functions and presentation, a new Event Timeline view, parental controls and more. Plus, all purchases can be made within the application itself.
 
“All of us here at iVerse have grown up with these amazing characters and stories, and we could not be more excited to be bringing them to ComicsPLUS.” said iVerse Media CEO, Michael Murphey. “New features like uView are going to be game changers for ComicsPLUS and we are incredibly excited to have DC Entertainment as a major part of it all.”
 
Broad digital distribution has remained a cornerstone of DC Entertainment’s business, leading to extensive growth in both digital and print sales over the past four years as digital availability attracts new readers and comic fans alike. DC Entertainment has the widest digital distribution of any comic book publisher and was the first major publisher to make its entire line available same-day digitally with the launch of DC Comics – The New 52.
Currently, English versions of DC Entertainment titles are available for download through iVerse Media. Download the ComicsPLUS App to get the latest periodicals, graphic novels and collected editions from DC Comics and Vertigo.

5 COMMENTS

  1. I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it until it happens: digital comics need to be 99 cents, not the $4 charged for print.

    I’m guessing Comixology, et al match print prices as part of their license agreement with the Big Two. What I’m not sure about is why smaller publishers like Image and Valiant also engage in this practice.

  2. @Johnny M – I assume they all do it because they all know they still depend on the direct/print market for the bulk of their sales, so they don’t want to piss them off.

  3. I can see 99 cents for renting a digital comic. Okay, I’ll pay a little more if I can download my own copy of a pdf. And a little more than that if it’s in high res. But really, these ‘ecomics’ are unlimited clones of the artist’s final digital art file, there is no scarcity or collector value.

  4. We’ve already had the same argument over book pricing.

    Amazon subsidized cheap ebook titles to encourage sales of Kindle readers.
    Consumers see the cheap price, and immediately accuse the publishers of price gouging by charging regular prices for paper editions.

    How is the price different between a print comic and a digital comic? The production costs are similar, the creators need to be paid, editorial must be funded, some profit needs to be generated at some point.
    Yes, distribution costs are different, but how much? Pennies?
    There’s also advertising… which is based on print circulation, as electronic comics don’t contain ads.
    (Red Giant is handing out FREE print copies of their comics. Newspapers do it as well, as do most commercial-based television broadcasters.)

    Publishers don’t care about “scarcity”. They want to print as many copies as can be sold. (And it’s the reader’s perception… the 2-D Futures End editions are scarcer than the 3-D versions. But guess which command the higher price?)

    Of course, the real argument should be “free”. Go read “Content” at Craphound. It’s free. All of Cory Doctorow’s are available free electronically, in (almost) every electronic format.

  5. Since we’re re-hashing it all, I’ll elaborate on Torsten’s comment.

    People often bring up “well how much can it cost to just house the servers and take the funds, etc. – that’s got to be much less expensive than printing and distributing…”

    Problem is, DC doesn’t pay those costs directly. They pay Comixology (and now, others) to handle those things. Just like they pay Diamond to distribute and pay retailers to sell the print editions.

    By the time Comixology (and Apple/Itunes/Google/Android/whoever’s app it is) take their cut, the “distribution and sales” cost of the digital is very similar to that of the print editions.

    All of which is, again, secondary to the fact that the pricing on digital is based on not taking too much competition away from the print retailers.

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