Marvel iPad App Preview Video; Boing Boing Slams Comics DRM - ComicsAlliance | Comics culture, news, humor, commentary, and reviews

I've been following the Marvel's digital comics apps and I was pleased to find the following post from Comics Alliance about how the Marvel stuff is going to work for iPad, iPhone, and iPod. You will buy individual issues for $1.99 like for the PSP store. However they will only be available on Apple products. I would like it were open with no DRM and I agree with the quote from the article.

I mean, look at that Marvel app (just look at it). I was a comic-book kid, and I'm a comic-book grownup, and the thing that made comics for me was sharing them. If there was ever a medium that relied on kids swapping their purchases around to build an audience, it was comics. And the used market for comics! It was -- and is -- huge, and vital. I can't even count how many times I've gone spelunking in the used comic-bins at a great and musty store to find back issues that I'd missed, or sample new titles on the cheap. (It's part of a multigenerational tradition in my family -- my mom's father used to take her and her sibs down to Dragon Lady Comics on Queen Street in Toronto every weekend to swap their old comics for credit and get new ones).
So what does Marvel do to "enhance" its comics? They take away the right to give, sell or loan your comics. What an improvement. Way to take the joyous, marvellous sharing and bonding experience of comic reading and turn it into a passive, lonely undertaking that isolates, rather than unites. Nice one, Misney.

I think a subscription model would work better with sharing options among the apple mobile devices, PSPs, and personal computers where subscribers can read any comic in the library.

Marvel iPad App Preview Video; Boing Boing Slams Comics DRM - ComicsAlliance | Comics culture, news, humor, commentary, and reviews

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