I can understand that for current series: you have to pay the talent. But what about older, out-of-print comics? Those production costs were paid for as much as 30, 40, or 50 years ago. I don’t think it costs Marvel $1.99 per issue to scan them into a digital format.

I’d like to see much lower prices for vintage comics, like $0.99 or less. I think a lot of people would buy them at that price, and Marvel could actually make some money off the 70 years of material that’s been sitting around.

How dare they like this device and two apps for it! What’s the standard, one dislike for every two likes?

I guess I have to turn in my geek card. That’s all gibberish to me.

All that aside, though – $500+ for a comic book reader? Really?

Oh, and the price of the APP is “free”.

Really.

I don’t think anyone can argue that a device like the iPad is the ideal way of reading a comic if a physical copy isn’t an option, but I think that comic companies might want to look towards an ad supported cost system that at least partially, if not fully, subsidizes the cost for the user. Or a monthly subscription service like netflix or something of that nature. I don’t think that a per comic unit price is ideal.

Tom Hanks’s character invented this in the movie “Big.” In 1988. Twenty-two years ago.

That’s almost as much turn-around time (from science fiction to science fact) as it took to go from the original Star Trek communicators (1966) to the modern flip-phone (c. 1996). Thirty years.

Compare
http://www.engadget.com/2004/03/15/shocker-star-trek-influences-gadget-design/
with
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_(form)

The view-one-panel-at-a-time feature is cool for zooming in and scrutinizing artwork but nobody should read a comic book like that. Part of the artistry of comic books is the design of a page as a whole.

Giving people day and date, reliable and affordable e-comics could not just address the scanners and pirate, but appeal to people who might never have walked into a comic shop.

Oh, absolutely. If I were running the company, I’d set the price lower for comics that had already paid themselves off, just like book publishers do when they release trade paperbacks. Marvel would be mostly be taking sales away from resellers, not themselves. The fear may be that having a vast, cheap library of older titles would cannibalize sales of expensive new titles, but that’s just a guess.

Anon @49, that only works if they still sell enough physical copies of the books to pay their costs. If they lose a physical sale for every digital sale, the digital sales need to carry their share of the burden. (I imagine it’s somewhere in the middle — opening the digital market increases sales overall, but does cut into print sales some — but, again, I’m guessing.)