What Can Publishers Learn from Digital Comic Books?
Large Publishers
Although they are clearly embracing mobile, larger CGM publishers had less to say publicly than their smaller counterparts. DC Entertainment (Time Warner) and Marvel Worldwide (Disney) have an impressive tablet-smartphone approach, using the comiXology cloud distribution platform and an elegant viewing methodology for small-screen devices. On tablets, comiXology titles are full-color facsimiles of the printed page, with various letterboxing and scaling options, plus email and social media sharing functionality. On smartphones, each swipe takes the reader to the next logical panel, with a smooth zoom to the best available width or height. Full-page panels can use auto-zoom to successive areas of interest, or the reader may manually pinch-zoom to see more detail.
John Parsons (john@intuideas.com), former Editorial Director of The Seybold Report, is an independent writer, ghostwriter, and editor. He is the co-author of the interactive printed textbook, Introduction to Graphic Communication, on the art, science and business of print, which has been adopted by Ryerson, Arizona State, the University of Houston, and many other schools and vocational training centers. Custom editions of the book are under consideration by major printing companies and franchises for internal training purposes.