What Can Publishers Learn from Digital Comic Books?
The emergence of digital books has been anything but easy for publishers. That's especially true in the trade market, where traditional sales channels have been upended by changes in consumer behavior and publishers have struggled to realize the early promise of the ebook as a rich new digital canvas.
In many ways, non-trade books, such as textbooks, have more effectively acclimated to the digital form. Although initially the complex layout and design of certain nonfiction genres made them problematic on reflowable content-reading devices, the advent of interactive tablets made such titles natural candidates for interactive, rich media publishing. Really, the education sector is leading the way in the use of "content chunking," adaptive content, and interactive publishing.
As publishers continue to test the potential for interactive ebooks, investigating what other sects are doing may offer clues on how to thrive in the digital era. One underexplored publishing segment is comic books, graphic novels, and manga, or CGM for short. The visually rich, often non-linear nature of the form suggests an interactive, game-like approach is well suited to tablets and smartphones. The emergence of responsive design and HTML-based standards like EPUB 3 is expected to empower CGM publishers—and should serve as an example for others with complex content. We interviewed a number of CGM publishers and advocates to discover how they are adapting to digital, and to see what lessons they might offer others.
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.
Outside North America, CGM has embraced EPUB 3. The standard has been widely adopted in Japan, and is deployed by the largest manga publishers (Kodansha, Shueisha, and Shogakakan), with a profile of EPUB 3 developed by the Electronic Book Publishers Association of Japan. This includes both fixed-layout and reflowable EPUB 3. France's largest publisher, Hachette, is also distributing significant numbers of fixed-layout comic titles in EPUB 3 form, primarily through the iBookstore.
The Bluewater Saga
Smaller, entrepreneurial publishers are more than happy to share their digital techniques. Darren Davis has been publishing comics since 1999, and founded Vancouver, Washington-based Bluewater Productions in 2006. From being an independent publisher of print titles, Bluewater has evolved into a diverse multimedia company, including on-demand web-to-print for short runs and even single titles, digital editions, interactive apps, digital audiobooks, and DVDs.
With the rise of tablets and smartphones, the transition to digital was a natural progression for the company. "Although the financial realities for comics have changed dramatically since the 1990s," says Davis, "apps, on-demand, and other media have made up for the loss of the old model."
Bluewater's digital products are designed and produced by Texas-based service provider Cosmic Ray Gun. The company has developed its own software to create fixed layout EPUB files for a variety of ebook distributors, apps, and devices. These include general ebook venues like Amazon Kindle and Apple iBook, as well as library resellers and of course comic-specific services Comicsfix and comiXology.
Cosmic Ray Gun spokesman Tony Garza praised comiXology's navigation approach, but pointed out some important caveats. "Panel to panel navigation works great for small screens, but for tablets it's not really necessary since the text is big enough to read. Some companies do slice the pages up by panel, but the tradeoff is the books become larger in file size. This in turn becomes more expensive in stores that charge by file size, such as Amazon."
Cosmic Ray Gun currently uses EPUB 2, although custom features requested by customers will make the change to EPUB 3 inevitable. "EPUB 3 is based on HTML5 whereas EPUB 2 supported XHTML," Garza noted. "Kids' books and any book that requires interactive and multimedia will benefit the most from EPUB 3 because it's based on HTML5—making it possible to create better features."
VIZ Media
Founded in 1986, San Francisco-based VIZ Media is the leading English-language publisher of Japanese manga, animation, and entertainment content. Beginning with its iPad app launch in late 2010, VIZ has rapidly expanded its e-manga offering to more than 2,000 different volumes for over 170 different series, available on native reading platforms from Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Google Play.
According to Gagan Singh, VIZ Media's CTO and executive vice president, the crossover of digital and print readership is small, and digital manga has not impacted print sales. "Our biggest competitor to digital sales is not print content," says Gagan. "It's Angry Birds and a myriad of other alternatives that compete for the same mindshare."
The transition to digital began with reliance on VIZ's prepress house to create the sequential JPEG files that comprised the digital books. Once it became obvious that economies of scale were needed, VIZ developed its own internal workflow, involving automated cropping, color correction, and generation of end-user formats. The company is now exploring responsive design techniques for some of its non-manga content, and currently uses EPUB 3 for some of its supported ebook platforms. Singh noted that the enhanced capabilities of EPUB 3 are currently used only in special cases—such as books with built-in video components—but is evaluating increased use for other interactive titles.
An Industry Veteran Weighs In
Mark Waid is a well-known comic book author and editor.His CV includes writing Flash and Superman titles for DC Comics, Captain America and Daredevil for Marvel,and being the editor-in-chief and later chief creative officer for Boom! Studios. Waid’s current projects include the experimental Thrillbent.com. He believes that digital publishing is beginning to change the art form itself, affecting the ways comic books and graphic novels are written, produced, distributed and read. "More and more, as artists and writers begin crafting for digital rather than print, they're taking advantage of some new storytelling techniques unique to the medium," says Waid. "Chief among them is the fact that once you take peripheral vision out of the reading equation, literally every single page turn can bring a surprise."
"The effect on distribution is seismic," says Waid. "The ability to get comics into the hands of anyone with an internet connection versus into the hands of those lucky enough to live within driving distance of a full-service comics shop—that's gigantic."
Waid made a point of highlighting the nature of digital comics themselves. "Comics isn't a genre; it's a medium. What's great about the way readers' media habits inform digital comics is that—unlike the majority of print comics and graphic novels, which are superhero material because that's what the comics shop market caters in—digital comics aren't bound by genre, allowing them to find entire new audiences who aren't interested in superheroes."
The technology for creating the digital comic media experience is still not fully realized. Waid decried early attempts at "motion comics" (simply animating still elements of a book) and noted that comiXology's panel-to-panel guided view is an improvement, but still an incomplete one. "They're still taking something that was designed for one medium (print) and adapting it into another (digital). Ultimately, I think the most successful work has been that which was created specifically for digital." On the question of fixed layout versus responsive design, Waid was similarly skeptical. "I've yet to see anyone successfully show me a comics page that can work both vertically and horizontally. But I keep an open mind."
Falling Short…
Another industry figure, Robert Scott, is president of the Comic Book Industry Alliance (CBIA). Scott noted that the difficulties for smaller publishers are considerable. "Smaller publishers who are struggling to create a toehold on brick-and-mortar store shelves are struggling even more to do so digitally—as they now have even more competition for consumers online than they ever did in comic and book stores. Even "successful" digital publishers are reporting that digital is less than 10% of sales. This is most likely due to their lack of marketing to new channels and relying on converting print readers instead of creating new readers."
Scott expressed considerable frustration at the industry's attempts to transition from print to digital. "Nothing has 'worked' in any sustainable or meaningful way. The ability to make the work available to new eyes and in new venues has been virtually ignored. Nothing gained traction because comic content is not valued by publishers and thus it receives little to no marketing beyond the existing customer base, which by and large is not interested in the alternate formats."
Scott continues: "Movies, music, and video games (many of which use those same comics as source material), invest millions to identify and rally new consumers to their brand. If tens of millions of moviegoers are flocking to theaters to see Batman, Spider-Man, and the X-Men, how is it that the publishers of that source material (and who in some cases own the studios making those movies) are unable to convert even 1% of those viewers into ongoing readers of their source material?"
Scott believes that publishers in general—like those in the comic book sector—are not yet applying the real advantages of the new medium. "What they must do is not treat digital and print as separate products. They must create synergistic packages that allow consumers to enjoy the content wherever they are and only pushing them to specific platforms when specific experiences are desired. Marvel Comics' augmented reality app is not sexy but it is a step in the right direction as they use the app's recognition of specific pages in a print comic to deliver value added content from enhanced art to creator interviews. The publishers that market their content, make it easy to access anywhere, anytime, and continue to find ways to offer value across the board are the publishers who will not only survive but flourish."
What Publishers Should Look For
CGM publishing highlights some—but certainly not all—of the challenges faced by publishers of similar, visually complex works. In the past, the rich visual layout of atlases, photography, or children's books has been well served by large printed pages. These pages often do not work as scaled-down digital replicas, or even as "slices" of a larger whole.
Early CGM efforts have shown that simply adapting the print medium directly to digital can lessen the author's or artist's original intent. Along the way, however, new storytelling techniques are emerging from the nature of the new, interactive digital canvas. Ideally, of course, as Scott points out, the strengths of both print and digital will be enhanced in a new, hybrid form.
What EPUB 3 can and should do is capture and normalize these new innovations—some of which we have not yet invented. It won't replace genius or innovation but it will make it less costly and more efficient to create both the message and its digital "container."
For publishers in general, CGM represents a real-world lab, both in terms of technology and standards and of changing business models. The over-used word, "engagement," is the ultimate goal of any storyteller, no matter what format or standard is employed. The practice of creating and selling these engaging media packages ("book" is too small a word) is an art and a business that requires mastery.
John Parsons (john@intuideas.com) is the Principal of IntuIdeas LLC in Seattle. He writes and advises on a variety of topics and technologies, including mobile publishing, e-books, editorial and design workflow, digital color, and Web-to-print. He has been helping companies cope with (and profit from) new technologies for over 20 years, including his tenure at The Seybold Report.
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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.