Comics going digital
April 25th, 2010 | By Ovi Demetrian Jr | Posted in DistributionPublishing
People are reading comics now more than ever and as people get used to reading eBooks on different devices, comic books will certainly become a part of their reading. Comics have actually already gone digital even before eBooks gained ground through online comic strips. I’ve been reading them for years and the idea of a device like the iPad brings new potential to how comics can be enjoyed. It also means that there is now a new platform for indie comic creators to expand their audience.
A great article I came across recently at Digital Book World talks about how the iPad and eBooks medium can be used for comics even when having to compete with a big publisher like Marvel or DC. I’ve highlighted a few good points that the author makes about how comics will be read digitally:
“A lot of people read comics digitally, but not enough on any single device to make digital distribution viable unless you’re able to make your content available on multiple platforms.”
“Breaking barriers and reinventing comics as a primarily digital art form is the only way to get beyond Marvel and DC’s stranglehold on the market.”
“Instead of multiple pages of panels read left-to-right, a comic can be a single page PDF one panel wide and hundreds of panels long scrolled down on your phone. It can be a slide show watched on a TV screen. Stories can be told from three different character points of view that you can toggle back and forth from. None of this is easily or cost-effectively possible with novels or video. Only comics seem to have this level of flexibility.”
“Text can be converted to tagged XML metadata files, which in turn can then easily be converted to any number of eBook formats, from Mobi to ePub. Metadata can be tagged to maximize web search capabilities; digital files for typical books can built in such a way as to facilitate easy and efficient ‘chunking’ and repurposing.”
Be sure to read the two-part article titled “Digital Comics: Level the Playing Field” for more: Part I | Part II
Ovi Demetrian Jr is the founder and interface designer for Indie Aisle. He loves books of fiction along with comics and has delusions of writing his own stories someday.