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 scanned 30-35,000 comics, of which 8-10,000 are accessible to a larger public, which might not know about specialized sites.

58% of the 50 best-selling comics are not available as e-books. The report notes that pirating teams are even able to scan and translate new mangas from Japan. It also points out that, strangely enough, even though the number of pirated comics is increasing, paper comic sales is also increasing. The books that sell the most are also pirated the most, and vice versa. Could there be something to the idea of piracy having a promotional effect? (Though, on the other hand, cause and effect could go the other way—pirates might just want most the the titles that sell the most.)

The article has a couple of points that puzzle me. For one thing, it says that “Pirated mangas are often streamed, whereas comic books are scanned.” I wonder if by “mangas” they mean animé? The idea of “streaming” a comic doesn’t make sense.

It also notes that pirated comics are “sold online until the legal version appears in France, at which point they are removed,” and puts their price at an average of $15, slightly below the price of the equivalent paper book. At least on this side of the Atlantic, I’ve never even heard of anyone selling pirated comic or manga scans; they’re all posted for free download on BitTorrent or cyberlocker sites.

One point that caught my attention was the suggestion that piracy is a response to unmet demand. This is something that folks like Gabe Newell of Valve have brought up before, and we see it play out in manga-related matters over here, too. For example, the manga and animé series Detective Conan had its first hundred or so issues and episodes translated and sold commercially over here (where it was known as Case Closed)—but the vast majority of the 800+ manga issues and 600+ TV episodes have not been translated and probably never will be. But fans translate and post them online for other fans to read or watch.

While it’s technically piracy, it’s the sort of “piracy” on which the entire anime fan community in the US was originally built—since technically-illegal fansubs were what launched demand for anime over here in the first place. And it seems doubtful that any company would see a 600-episode-and-still-going show as being worth the vast financial expenditures involved in translating, given that only the few most dedicated fans would even contemplate buying them all, let alone be able to afford them, so it’s probably going to continue to be an unmet demand.

There are an awful lot of animé and manga that have never been and probably never will be licensed for American translation and sale—too esoteric for the broader audiences over here for a licensee to be able to recoup its investment. And as long as there isn’t a way for fans to get them in English legitimately, they’ll continue to be pirate-fansubbed. (Small wonder that some animé studios are beginning to subtitle their domestic DVDs in English themselves!)

This seems to be the same thing the French comics community is finding out: if people can’t get the comics legitimately in the form they want, surprise! They’ll find a way to get it illegitimately.

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. And while I never could get into Diesel Sweeties myself, I know a number of people who love the strip so I have it on good authority that it’s good stuff.

This subsequently led to hordes of comic book fans learning how to download comics from the Internet—and to more of them scanning and posting said comics. Ironically, Baker ended up winning two Eisner awards for the comic and it was the only one from the anthology to be reprinted.

The point is that when the distribution system– and I mean the entire chain, from publishers to distributors to retailers — fails, a black market will pop up. It happened with this story. It happened when people couldn’t get copies of Captain America #25. It’s happening now with Miracleman, one of the more popular torrents out there, because it can’t be brought back into print. It’s happening in countries where legitimate versions aren’t available yet, if ever — witness fan-subbed manga and anime, or Doctor Who episodes. It’s happening more and more as publishers try to extract every last dime they can out of the existing fan base, placing themselves on the upper half of a Laffer curve.

And it’s not going to get any better. But then, it never does, once you’ve shown them that sometimes, getting a copy online is the only way you’re ever going to get to read it. Even if it’s not strictly legal.

Of course, sometimes content producers can learn. For the first time ever, the most recent season of Doctor Who actually aired on the same day in the US and the UK. (Well, part of it did anyway. About half of it was delayed by one week, suggesting that the content producers may still have a bit to learn yet.)

(Found via BoingBoing.)

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 awesome and e-books stink. If everything except form factor is the same, and you eliminate everything that’s the same in comparing one form over the other, then what’s left over must be the awesome part: a book full of blank paper.

The alt-text secondary punchline compares this idea to homeopathic medicine, which seems about right. If just the act of taking an empty pill can make you better, then the act of holding a blank paper book can tell you a story. Now that we know the secret, perhaps we can more easily keep paper book lovers happy after the rest of us are reading electronically.

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 a prog journey, but that really is making your own fun at its most innocent, deny that if you like.

The relationship with a book is very different. It’s a tactile object relatively unchanged since the Gutenberg press. You’ve got to hold that thing in front of your face. It’s your buddy until you’re done with it. A well-thumbed, much read book is like a vile, beloved, drooled on childhood bunny, but you wouldn’t buy one of those second-hand unless you had a lot of problems in your life.

He feels that e-books can lead to throwing stuff in whose quality would never have made the cut in a more space-limited paper form, and that “Any graphic work is dead on screen compared to how it looks on paper.” A bit of a weird attitude for a webcartoonist to have, isn’t that?

I found a link to the post on Adam Tinworth’s blog, and as Tinworth points out, books versus e-books “shouldn’t be entirely an either/or choice.” There are still plenty of books being produced today—high-quality hardcovers that are still worth having. Even if the e-book kills the mass-market paperback, that kind of higher-end hardcover book should still be available for those who want it.

And honestly, for all the advantages e-books offer, it doesn’t seem likely they’ll completely drive out paper the way CDs drove out LPs, cassettes, and reel to reel and MP3s are driving out CDs. At least not in the short term.

I suppose there’s really not so much different about Allison’s post than there is about any old-school paper bibliophile’s opinions, which we carry from time to time. Perhaps there isn’t really any point to reporting on this negativity, but it’s worth presenting the odd opposing view from time to time to remind us that not everyone shares the same feelings about e-books.

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 article notes, the stores don’t want to become “showrooms for Amazon’s digital warehouse”—places where people can come and leaf through books, then buy them more cheaply or digitally via Amazon. And if they can’t carry the digital version of popular print titles, that means print-browsing buyers who prefer digital will have no choice but to do exactly that.

A lot of people are unhappy about the situation:

In online comics forums and other places where the issue is being debated, everyone is unhappy with someone. Amazon is being accused by some of throwing its considerable weight around to the detriment of readers and the larger culture. DC Comics is being criticized by others of placing greed over its fans. Barnes & Noble is alternatively being accused of throwing its own weight around and of cutting off its nose to spite its face. Even the comics’ writers are getting some heat.

The article quotes Neil Gaiman, whose Sandman graphic novels are affected, as being “heartbroken” that his works won’t be available for his and his kids’ readers, but annoyed with Barnes & Noble for giving Amazon and other stores a physical exclusive as well as the electronic one.

DC Comics seems to be surprised by the backlash, and claims it is being “misunderstood”. Jim Lee, co-publisher of DC Entertainment, says other platforms that can run the Kindle app will have access to the comics, and Amazon is “not the be-all and end-all of our digital strategy and distribution.” He counsels fans to “have a little patience.” Of course, in a world where people in the know can immediately download any comic they want to for free, without the publishers or creators seeing a dime, “patience” can be hard to come by.

On Gizmodo, Kyle Wagner worries that the disappearance of comics from bookstores in a notably small-margin industry could lead to books being cancelled, and also points out that this means fans without Kindles are out of luck for both electronic and physical versions…unless they order the physical versions from Amazon.

Are printed books disappearing because of e-books? Well, printed DC comic books are disappearing from the big chain bookstores because of e-books. It remains to be seen what effect this will have on the industry’s sales—or on its digital exclusive decisions.

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 not clear from the press release how long this exclusivity will last before the comics are made available to anyone who can use a Comixology app. (Indeed, I get the feeling that “exclusively” may be hyperbole, given that the press release itself talks about having them available via the Kindle Store, which would mean even people with PCs should be able to buy them.)

If you were, like myself, not fortunate enough to be at the Amazon press conference event on Wednesday, you can now watch it via a YouTube video posting from Amazon. It’s rather low-resolution and blurry at 360P, and starts with a gratuitous user-testimonial Kindle commercial that drags on for two and a half minutes!, and we already know all about the products Jeff Bezos discusses, but it is still worth watching to just see Bezos try to be Steve Jobs.

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”.

Burns points out that the metaphor xkcd artist Randall Monroe is trying to make here simply doesn’t work in context. The tree in the original book gives of itself things that belong to it—its fruit, its branches, its trunk, etc. It doesn’t give (or lend) something made by someone else. Burns writes:

Look, I’m all for DRMless electronic books — especially since 95% of my book purchases are electronic now. (Honestly, it’s to the point that when I get a paper book, it seems needlessly inconvenient to me.) But… this just doesn’t work. That it feels like an anvil being hammered down on top of it all and the surrealist element isn’t executed well enough to break either the willing suspension of disbelief or absurdist thresholds (a USB port in a tree? The tree is… one big flash drive? Huh?) just makes it more jarring.

And below the post, a commenter going by “Terrible Idea” suggests that the strip actually sends the opposite message to the point Monroe was trying to make.

At the end of The Giving Tree, the tree is nothing but a dead stump because it has given every part of itself. At the end of this strip, the tree is very much alive and well. So, protecting its IP with DRM literally saves this tree’s life from the usual selfish humans who would just take, take, take. In what way could this possibly be construed as a bad deal for the tree (or by metaphor, the company that would use DRM)?

And as a final irony, out of curiosity I checked both Amazon and Barnes & Noble and determined that the book The Giving Tree is not actually available as a DRMed e-book at all—though it can be downloaded as a DRM-free PDF from a Peruvian(?) university, or read online in HMTL at AllPoetry.com (albeit in both cases without the illustrations that help make it such a classic book, and probably without permission from the Silverstein estate).

Monroe has had some great, on-point strips about DRM in the past (for example the ones we mentioned here, here, here, and here), so it’s a little weird that his latest one falls so flat.

And then I asked Tayler if he wouldn’t mind answering a few quick questions about how he monetized his webcomic, and what his e-book plans might be down the road. He graciously agreed. Here is the transcript:

Me: When you began Schlock Mercenary, what was your plan for monetizing your webcomic? Did you start it with the goal in mind of making a living from it, or was it just a hobby that grew into something more?

Howard: When I first started cartooning, I very quickly decided that I wanted to do this for a career, and began investigating possible business plans, and one that seemed to make the most sense was to find a publisher—build an audience, and then eventually find a publisher and make a living off of books. I thought that would take about ten years. It turned out that I found a publisher after four years, but I wasn’t going to be able to make a living selling books through that publisher because the audience wasn’t large enough. But if I self-published, I could make a living immediately.

And so that’s what we did—we self-published and made a living selling books ourselves. That’s always been the plan. That was ten years ago I first started thinking about that. For the last five years, we’ve operated under the assumption that we would always be able to sell books and other merchandise to Schlock Mercenary fans and we’d be able to make decent enough margins on it that we didn’t need to have half a million people reading the comic. We could get by with a hundred, two hundred thousand people reading the comic and maybe just a few thousand buying merchandise that would support the family.

Me: When you’re selling merchandise at conventions like this, do you make anything off it, or is it more of a break-even thing?

Howard: We make money. We definitely make money. We make enough money to pay for the booth, to pay back ourselves for paying for the booth last year, excuse me next year. We pay the manufacturing costs of the merchandise. We pay all of my travel expenses, you know, all those expenses factor into it. And after all that’s been factored in, we usually at least double our money. Shows where I can’t double my money or shows that are just really really stressful, I stopped doing. San Diego [ComiCon] is one of those shows because San Diego costs easily three times as much to do as any other show I’ve done. But GenCon is one of the more expensive shows I do but it’s still very very popular for us, and so we come.

Me: So, as e-books become more popular and print books start declining, do you think that’s going to affect your revenue model in the future?

Howard: The question is hugely loaded. You are suggesting that print books are going to start declining by virtue of e-books becoming more popular. Those are not cause and effect, and so I’m correcting the question. It is possible that print books will decline; it is possible this will happen as a result of the rise of e-books. What I suspect will happen, however, is that there will always be an audience for the sorts of print that I put together, and that I will continue to be able to make a living off of that. If that’s not the case, I can still make a perfectly good living selling electronic editions of Schlock Mercenary and we’ve already begun prototyping that kind of work.

Me: Even though you’ve still got the webcomic available for free?

Howard: Yes.

Me: So what formats are you going to be doing that in? PDF, EPUB?

Howard: We’ve looked at PDF and it’s only attractive for PCs; it doesn’t work well on any other device. EPUB and Mobi are not ideal because they don’t handle illustrations well, especially not full color. So we’re still prototyping. I’m not going to lock down a format now.

Me: Last question. You have earned a reputation for never missing an update. How do you do that?

Howard: I work several weeks ahead and I prioritize so that during the period in which the buffer is getting smaller, one of my highest priorities is to make sure that the buffer will get larger. It doesn’t matter if I’m in a bad mood, having a bad day, sick, whatever. If the buffer needs to be built, I go and I build it. I cowboy up and I get the job done. Sure, there are days when I don’t want to work, and decide not to. That’s fine, because I’m working several weeks ahead. When there are days when I really feel like working, I will sit down and jam and get a whole bunch of extra work done.

Me: All right, well great. Thanks, I really appreciate you taking the time to speak to me.

Howard: You’re welcome!

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 to its most popular title, Macross, to Harmony Gold, supposedly in perpetuity. They apparently didn’t think the rights would ever be worth anything. Subsequently, lawsuits have raged in Japan over whether the studio had the right to make that sale.)

But ever since the anime explosion of the late ‘90s, that has been changing, and manga publishers have grown upset over the proliferation of “scanlations” of their titles in America and elsewhere. It’s good to see that some of them are dealing with the problem through trying to compete with the pirates rather than just legal action. The subscriptions seem reasonably priced—$10 gets 1,000 points, which are then used to buy various issues. In some of the titles I browsed, I saw a 29-page chapter available for 190 points (equivalent to $1.90), which seems like a decent deal for the medium.

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 the most recognized Dark Horse properties, but one of the most recognized franchises in the world, to digital."

The site also offers some bundles, such as a 5-issue series for $7.99.

I wonder how long it will be before individual comic issues stop being published in print at all? Phil and Kaja Foglio found it more economical to stop publishing printed Girl Genius comics altogether in favor of posting a webcomic and selling graphic novels (and novelizations). As the recent spate of movies (including Captain America, which I just got finished seeing) shows, it seems as if comic book properties may be making more money now as seeds for making movies than as ink on paper. And if the sales of ink on paper fall far enough that it is no longer worth the money to print them…well.

Seen in that light, DC Comics’s frequent start-all-over-again revamps start to take on an air of desperation. “Maybe if we do this, we’ll sell more comics? No? Well, what about this? Or maybe this?”

Comic books used to be available for purchase in every grocery or corner drugstore—but, much as with paperback books, the selection has waned or vanished altogether. Now the only way to get physical comics, apart from subscribing through the mail, is the “Friendly Local Comics Shop”—which could be an hour’s drive away. Needless to say, same-day digital availability could shift a lot of business away.

But, Burns points out, even as local comics shops may be headed for extinction, this is simply another step in the general trend of business moving on-line that’s been affecting many physical retail stores. The real bad news involves DC’s tone-deaf digital pricing initiatives.

The disaster comes, as it sadly often does, by a fundamental lack of understanding of online economics. A lack of understanding all too common in corporations, even when they develop an online presence. In the end, too many executives expect the digital version of a product to be the same as the physical version — only with a significantly better profit margin.

First, Burns explains, the digital version of the comic will cost the exact same $2.99 the print issue does. (Mainstream print publishers have learned this lesson, at least since the coming of Amazon—while consumers may complain about $12-$15 e-books, there’s no denying that they are less expensive than $26 hardcovers.) And the price shows no sign of declining over time.

Burns uses the example of the comic book “maxi-series” 52, which ran from May 2006 to May 2007. The series has long since been collected into a set of four trade-paperback graphic novels, with retail prices of $19.95 each. He could get them for cover price ($79.80) at his Friendly Local Comic Store, or for 10% off with his member discount at Barnes & Noble ($71.80). Or he could get them from Amazon for $13.59 each ($54.36), or if he went used he could get them for $9.95 each ($39.80) from an Amazon marketplace member with Amazon Prime free shipping—which, as he points out, means that DC doesn’t make one red cent off of his purchase.

But if he goes through Comixology, which handles DC’s digital comic sales, he finds that only the individual issues of 52 are available, and altogether cost a total of $102.49—over $20 more than the graphic novel collections, and without the additional commentary and other extra material the graphic novels incorporate. Which means, as a disbelieving Burns recounts, that he could perfectly legally acquire the entire series, plus all the extra behind-the-scenes stuff the on-line version leaves out, for almost $63 less than the cheapest on-line version, if he bought the used graphic novels—without any money going to DC at all.

And 52 is just a convenient example.

Go through the DC store on Comixology. It’s everywhere. Stuff from fifteen years ago? $1.99 Stuff from 1985 with the cover price of 75¢ still on the thing? $1.99.

And, as Burns points out, DC’s competitor Marvel offers a $60 per year all-you-can-read subscription service, which lets him read anything and everything Marvel has on-line for $40 less than DC wants for just 52.

Burns suggests that DC should go to a system of discounting older works to make them more attractive for people to buy on-line, and incorporate additional graphic novel material when it becomes available. This would give customers incentive to purchase the digital works even of older content, and give DC money that it would otherwise not see.

This certainly strikes a chord with me. I never could get into comic books when I was younger—my parents wouldn’t buy them for me. And it’s hard to blame them. The thing about comic books was that you had to buy every one and follow them religiously or you’d get lost. There was no way to catch up; libraries didn’t exactly stock them. It was financially not unlike a cigarette habit (though, granted, a lot better for your lungs). All those “cheap” issues added up financially over time, as Burns’s calculations for just one 52-issue series shows. And that, at least, doesn’t seem to have changed much.

And there’s an elephant in the room that Burns didn’t address: Internet comic book piracy. Comic piracy is rampant on-line, and it’s easy to see why. You don’t have to OCR comic books; you just scan them, zip them, and you’re done. Anyone with a scanner can do it, and many people with scanners probably do. There are commercially-sold comic book reader applications for most platforms, including the iPad, for the most commonly-used formats.

Everyone has to make up his own mind whether he can justify illicit downloading—but among those who do feel they can justify it, “unfair” pricing of digital content is one of the most commonly-heard rationales. If DC doesn’t address this issue, it may be sowing the seeds of more trouble down the road.

I suspect that, given a few years, DC will probably come around to offering lower digital prices. It took a few years for publishers to recognize that consumers wanted to pay less for paperback and backlist titles (and they could afford to make backlist titles cheaper, given that they had already paid for themselves a long time ago). And while in some cases there may be more lip service paid to the idea than readers would like, publishers at least seem to acknowledge that as books get older, the e-books should get cheaper.

But what’s most unusual about this particular reset is that, for the first time, DC has committed to releasing every one of its comic books digitally on the same day as it releases the print version. This will, DC points out, make it the first of the two major American comic book publishers to do so. That will undoubtedly come as good news to all the e-book-reading comic book fans out there.

Of course, in a way the comic book companies have been forced into this. Comic books have long been one of the more-easily pirated forms of physical media—after all, they only consist of a couple of dozen pages per issue, and do not require intensive optical character recognition to turn into e-books. Comics have been floating around on peer-to-peer in CBR format for years, and readers for the format have come out for any number of computer platforms, including the iPad.

If DC wants comic book fans to buy its DRM-restricted offerings rather than download illicit DRM-free versions, making them available the same day as the print version is a good way to start. And it shows that, unlike mass market book publishers, DC does not seem to be under any illusion that it needs to protect its print market at the expense of the new electronic market. It still remains to be seen, however, whether DC can out-compete free.

Although one commenter points out it’s actually been on-line for two years now, the Comics Beat blog (and BoingBoing) just noticed that the entire 6500+ page collection of Wendy and Richard Pini’s ElfQuest comic book series is posted online for free reading. Published beginning in 1978, ElfQuest was one of the first breakout hits of the independent comics scene, and paved the way for many works to follow.

It can now be read online, via a Flash reading application (which means, alas, it’s unreadable on the best way to read digital comic books, the iPad—though someone associated with the site did post to BoingBoing that they are looking into making it available for iOS devices as well). There are also a couple of web stores—an out-of-print books store, and a CafePress shop that sells the standard clothing, mugs, and the usual.

There doesn’t seem to be any form of inexpensive print-on-demand collections of ElfQuest available, however—it seems you can either read it on-line, or pay $100 per out-of-print paper graphic novel. (Though I suppose I might well have been looking in the wrong place.)

At any rate, it’s good to see it all available even if it is in an awkward format. It seems the Pinis are using their body of work as a free draw, and hoping to make money on merchandising. I hope it works out well for them.

(Found via Techdirt.)