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Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Books Digital Comics Got a Lot More Real

Posted by Paul Constant on Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 1:28 PM

At Emerald City Comicon last weekend, the interestingly named Rantz Hoseley unveiled the public beta of LongBox, which he envisions as "the iTunes of comics." You can now download Longbox for free over here.

The Beat has a long interview with Hoseley about what Longbox does now and where it's going to be heading:

THE BEAT: Let’s talk about platforms. Of course, the shiny new bauble on the horizon is the iPad. Will LongBox be available on the iPad?

HOSELEY: We have an iPad version in development and an Android tablet version in development and we’re currently looking at the newly announced Winmo 7. In all of these cases it’s not just a matter of the technical adaptation, the bigger issue for us is that we’re not interested in just being in the user interface over to a tablet. There are distinct user interaction requirements that so many people seem to be failing at and that are failing on what the phone, much less what the tablet interface is going to be like. They are not thinking about the usability aspects of it — how is someone going to be holding and navigating this, how is someone going to interact with this device. Making sure that those interactions are consistent in this application [is key for us.] We’ve been thinking about things like the tablet interactions since day one.

Comments (7) RSS

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I stopped reading at "the itunes of comics"

that's a really lame line

Posted by watchout5

on March 16, 2010 at 1:45 PM

I am so looking forward to these on my iPad.

Sadly, though, one hopes indie comics will still have distro then. Higher cost of entry into the market with this format.

Posted by Will in Seattle

on March 16, 2010 at 2:03 PM

Why would all digital have a higher cost of entry? Right from the colorist to release, rather than to press would be cheaper, no?

Posted by Joe Szilagyi

on March 16, 2010 at 2:23 PM

@1: I stopped reading at "I stopped reading." It's a quote, and it's kind of apt.

@3: Agreed, though the printing costs don't eat up as much of the final product cost as you might think.

Posted by Paul Constant

on March 16, 2010 at 2:46 PM

@4 I blame all that Canadian printing.

Posted by Joe Szilagyi

on March 16, 2010 at 2:58 PM

I'll stick with htmlcomics.com, and the comic book store, that's a great place to get comics too, especially since they're a collectors item and not just literature.

Posted by Freche_Lola on March 16, 2010 at 4:05 PM

@3 for a firm. One of the major barriers for any comics producer is fixed costs. Dev platform, services, etc. Cost of delivery tends to be a fixed signup with a min delivery/order, but if they use an iTunes system, it's not so bad, but still favors the middle tier firm over the small firm.

Maybe htmlcomics will work well with HTML5 and its next version HTML6, both of which will be supported by the iPad.

Posted by Will in Seattle

on March 16, 2010 at 4:23 PM