Thursday, January 29, 2009

The State Of Illegal Comic Torrents


This screen grab was pulled at about 2am EST, meaning the comic had been posted at approximately 1pm EST on Wednesday. That's earlier than a lot of shops have their pull lists sorted for regular customers. I'm sure it was available on Usenet in advance of that.

And these are just people that are dedicated to it as a hobby.

The comic book industry is losing a lot of potential money by continuing to ignore the market for making their books available directly on the internet. Availability online opens you up to customers where there are little-to-no comic books available.

I remember hearing from a Newsarama reader/poster located in Barbados (a lovely country that I'm enjoying some time in at the moment) who indicated he used torrents because it was the only way he could get timely access to comic books (or get them at all). This is purely anecdotal stuff, but I doubt that he's alone or that he represents a small enough group that it should be ignored.

Posted by Kevin Huxford at 2:06 AM
Labels: , ,

6 comments:

  1. This is just a repeat of what went down in the music biz. Napster and Limewire romped until the music industry was pulled kicking and screaming into the digital download age. Even then, they tried to push us toward a subscription model vs. a download and own each song approach. Rhapsody exemplified the former, iTunes the latter. We all know how that played out. At the current time iTunes and Amazon rule the world. Napster and Rhapsody are dead. Marvel is using the subscription model and it hasn't deterred the torrent users in the least. The torrents will thrive until single issue downloads are available.
    ReplyDelete
  2. You ran across this when you were looking for horny housewives to fool around with, didn't you?? Don't deny it!

    -Tim
    ReplyDelete
  3. Heh...I noticed those ads in there and wondered how long it would take for someone to crack a joke. Certainly wasn't looking for anything like that, though.
    ReplyDelete
  4. I'm also someone living abroad - In Asia actually, and while I've discovered that Thailand and Japan have Graphic novel infrastructure (in English no less!)and Japan even has some current issue comic shops, sadly my country is not one of those. I miss comics, and have no reasonable way to get them. Shipping literally triples the cover price per issue for me, and the wait is long and unreliable. trades are not even reliable, and I don't want to wait for trades, I want to stay a part of the community. I have a good job as a mid-sized company director. I can certainly pay for my comics habit, and did back home, but not at triple price and triple delay.

    So I torrent. I'm unrepentant. Put the newsprint in my hand and I will willingly pay, I did for years and have the cash to continue. Screen reading just isn't the same, but if there were a viable on-line pay option, I would happily download for a reasonable fee. I do it with itunes and netflix already to keep up with my favorite media from home, and have several newspaper subscriptions. The only area where I'm forced to go 'illegal' is comics.
    ReplyDelete
  5. I know this is an old post, but I was just looking at torrents and thinking that the iPad with an iTunes model for comics is ideal. However, I think $0.99 is the right price per issue.
    ReplyDelete
  6. Well, I have read a lot of torrents online which were so good that I went out and purchased multiple collections to share with friends.
    ReplyDelete

It is preferred that you sign some sort of name to your posts, rather than remain completely anonymous. Even if it is just an internet nickname/alias, it makes it easier to get to know the people that post here. I hope you all will give it some consideration. Thank you.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)