Publishing Perspectives has an interesting article about comic book piracy in France, focusing on a report by the Paris government’s “Le MOTif” book and writing “observatory”. The third in a series of reports on piracy that began in 2009, Le MOTif zoomed in on comics, as this is the category of books that is pirated the most in France. Comic books make up 10-14% of France’s global book market, but the availability of comics in e-book format does not meet the readers’ needs — resulting in organized teams of pirates (up to 100) that have...

CNet reports that cartoonist Richard Stevens III has released a free, DRM-free PDF of the first physical book collection of his webcomic Diesel Sweeties. Although the entire strip is archived for free on-line, the e-book represents a PDF conversion of a printed collection which includes a foreword, character information, and edited and recolored artwork taking into account the lessons Stevens learned through experience. The giveaway is, of course, meant to promote Stevens’s web store where he sells merchandise related to the strip (including printed strip collections). But that’s to be expected; Baen’s DRM-free digital giveaways work the same way....

How did comic book e-piracy get started? Writer and comic book colorist Glenn Hauman gave his opinion in 2007. It had to do with a comic book story by Kyle Baker, “Letitia Lerner, Superman’s Babysitter,” that was to be published in the Elseworlds 80 Page Giant #1 anthology, but ended up getting the entire book pulped due to DC president Paul Levitz’s concerns the story was inappropriate. However, the book had already shipped to Europe, and someone overseas scanned it and posted it to the Internet. This subsequently led to hordes of comic book fans learning how to download...

Today’s xkcd makes a point that may relate to the constant griping about e-books from some old-time bibliophiles. It involves a stick-figure with a shelf full of completely blank books, who insists that the words don’t matter because the sheer act of holding a book “prompts [his] mind to enrich itself.” The last panel of the strip is brilliant, but I refuse to spoil it. Go read it for yourself. Though e-books are never mentioned, it’s easy to see this as the logical extension of the arguments paper book lovers advance as to why paper books are...

John Allison, webcartoonist for a number of strips (the only one I recognized by name was Scary Go Round), has posted an entry to his blog lamenting the rise of the e-book and the passing of the print book. While he likes digital music, he explains, he does not feel the same way about e-books: I hate them. I genuinely hate them. With music, your relationship is predominantly with what is going in your ear. Yes, you may stare at the cover for Tales From Topographic Oceans by Yes for half an hour while going on...

We mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Barnes & Noble had pulled all of DC Comics’s graphic novels from its bookstores in protest over DC’s exclusive e-comic sales through the Kindle Fire when it had refused to sell them electronically through the Nook Color. This action has started getting more media coverage lately, with a report in the New York Times yesterday on the incident, and an update—bookselling chain Books a Million (which sells a version of the Nook as its own e-reader) has also pulled DC’s graphic novels, for the same reason. As the Times...

Three quick Kindle stories courtesy of our sister blog Gadgetell: Office-supply store Staples is going to carry the new line of Kindles. It will have the $79 low-end Kindle with Special Offers available on October 8th, and will add the Kindle Touch ($99 Special Offers and $139 ad-free), Touch 3G, and Fire in November. The Kindle Keyboard with Special Offers will also remain available at its $99 price point. The Amazon Fire will have 100 exclusive digital graphic novels available from DC, including titles such as Watchmen, Superman: Earth One, and Batman: Arkham City that have never been digitally available before. It’s...

I was considering mentioning this xkcd comic strip on the evils of DRM the other day, but didn’t think it was really worth bringing up on its own. However, my friend Eric A. Burns has posted a most cogent analysis of the strip on his blog Websnark.com, and I do think that’s worth mentioning. The strip has to do with a tree that has a USB port embedded in it, offering an e-book copy of the Shel Silverstein book The Giving Tree—except that, due to DRM, the people who download it can’t read it and “lending is not enabled”....

When I was wandering around GenCon, I quite unexpectedly came across a booth where Howard Tayler of the ten-years-old-and-still-going Schlock Mercenary webcomic was selling books, sighing autographs, and personalizing the books he sold with requested character doodles. I hadn’t even known he was going to be there, but naturally, I bought a book and had a doodle made. (Which sort of ties into a point that Michael Stackpole made in the interview with him that I have yet to transcribe—that people don’t buy books at cons as books, they buy them as souvenirs.) And then I asked Tayler...

Galleycat reports that a group of 39 Japanese manga publishers has launched a portal site called JManga, offering digital English translations of manga readable in a Flash-based on-line reader. The manga is for sale via point-based subscription, but also offers free one-issue previews. It has a number of popular titles now, such as Naruto and One Piece, and plans to have 10,000 titles available by 2013. It used to be that Japanese content producers didn’t care what happened to their work outside of Japan. (Case in point: in the early 1980s, Japanese studio Tatsunoko licensed the external-to-Japan rights...

At San Diego Comic Con, CNet reports, Dark Horse has announced it will be publishing Star Wars comics digitally, going along with its other digital comic selections. It currently has more than 50 Star Wars comics available purchase through its on-line store at digital.darkhorse.com. The comics will cost the same as other Dark Horse digital comics, with most priced at $1.99, some at $1.49, regular $0.99-per-comic sales, and several free issues, said Jeremy Atkins, Dark Horse's director of public relations. "This represents a game-changing moment in our digital program as we bring not only one of...

My friend Eric Burns has recently started blogging again on Websnark, his blog that largely covers webcomics and comic books. In a post today, Burns looks at DC’s plans for same-day digital availability of every issue of every book starting with its “reboot” later this year, the “New 52”. While at first glance it looks like great news for those who prefer their media digital—especially since print comics are no longer as widely available as they used to be—Burns finds it runs up right against one of the same problems that has dogged print versus e-books: the matter of price....