ComiXology, like Netflix, was a killer app that killed a lot of piracy by introducing convenience. And a bunch of fine back to comic book piracy. But a lot of people have simply stopped buying and reading comics, in digital and print. They may be the biggest beneficiaries of the Amazon change. DC Unlimited Infinity did not see a bump until they added Canada to their territories, and Australasia this week. I have been told that Marvel Unlimited has had a bump in subscriptions, though the new Marvel Unlimited Infinity Comics may have helped that. Where are the customers going? Back to comic book stores? I have seen only sporadic evidence of that, and there is no statistically significant bump. The long tail has been snipped off at the spine. The fact that previous links to ComiXology listings no longer work has been seen as a real impediment to driving traffic to the comic books in question. Well, that has not happened, especially in territories where Amazon has disabled the Subscription feature that used to let people automatically receive the next issue of whatever series they were following. Comic book publishers tell Bleeding Cool that they have a definite initial drop in digital sales across the board, and hoped that this would rise back up, when people got used to the ComiXology changes. Six weeks in, how are things? Well, still pretty terrible. But as the ComiXology App was also updated, a stream of other complaints came in, talking about how people's libraries had been removed, downloads deleted, the speed of reading delayed, definition degraded, ease of use decimated and we reported an account from a ComiXology Beta Tester looking at the circumstances behind some of the changes. Which is a pain for many and may well lead to reduced income for publishers and creators. Another big issue is for the non-Americans only, as they are no longer able to subscribe to digital series. For some undisclosed reason. It is ComiXology App only on mobile devices and tablets or using a reskinned version of Kindle reader on the desktop – which was not designed for reading comic books. We have reported on the dropping of the ComiXology website comic book reader. Bleeding Cool has been reporting on concerns about digital comic book distributor ComiXology and its switch to the Amazon website and structure since they were implemented six weeks ago.
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