Cory Doctorow on Downloadable Comics

Cory Doctorow is an authority on copyright law and a huge oppoenent to DRM. Among many many other things, he is also an author and a comic book fan. Newsarama put up a interview with him a while back and I thought it was important to link to it. He has some very intelligent things to say and offers up his own solution. I highly recommend giving this a read. Here are a few juicy excerpts:

I don’t think that downloadable comics substitute for printed comics. I think that downloadable comics entice people to but printed comics. The key calculation you have to make when you talk about digital distribution versus physical distribution is how much it entices and how much it substitutes.

But there’s a much larger audience of people who are, not price sensitive, but are time sensitive, or have other aesthetic or design considerations that come into play when they think about what kind of media they’re going to consume. For example, people who love seeing movies in a big cinema, or people who love holding books, or people who take their comics home in a Mylar bag with a board behind it, and then buy a second copy so they don’t get fingerprints on the first one. For those people, the question becomes does having a free online edition that they can sample, and, more importantly to me, be moved about on the internet in a social way from friend to friend on recommendation – does that create more sales than are lost by allowing a few cheapskates to get their copies for free?

Comic book stores, when they hook you, have a Wednesday audience. There are so many people who will come to a comic book store every Wednesday and, while they’re only in there to buy a three dollar comic, many times they walk out of there holding a twenty dollar graphic novel with a much higher margin than that three dollar comic. That’s an amazing position to be in, and it’s something that almost any other kind of retailer would give anything for. But the problem is the audience for comic book stores is not growing. The growth in the industry seems to be coming from trade editions sold in traditional retail outlets. People who will go into bookstores are still not a huge mainstream audience.

Go here to read the whole article and see Cory’s proposed solution.