This week’s COMIXOLOGY BLACKOUT confirms my fears over service.

Real talk: I fucking adore comiXology. In a world where my LCS lets Rendar and me down every week, it has arrived like a beautiful bastard upon a stunning stallion. Lending me its hand, it murmurs in my ears the promises of taking me to a world where comic books are accessible. However, I have some reservations. Unlike Amazon and B&N’s proprietary services, there is no way to access your files. They’re intangible intangibles, and this is concerning. What if comiXology goes out of business? Or what if – say – Marvel breaks their servers?

Doom!

I will continue using comiXology. It’s convenient, the comics look great in HD. However, they should let us consumers hold our files in our own hands.

Hit the break for Corey Blake’s far more eloquent interrogation of the problem.

Robot 6:

The crash of comiXology’s servers over the weekend brings home a nagging detail to digital comics that deserves renewed attention: the lack of a file for consumers to keep.

The current model for most digital comics providers is to offer access to files through a proprietary reader available through their apps or websites. It’s essentially a leasing arrangement, granting temporary access with an open-ended term limit. You can “download” a local copy, but this isn’t a true download. The file is returned to the provider’s cloud storage after a short period of inactivity, although access remains through your library on the reader.

All things being fine in the universe, that hasn’t caused many problems. There have been a few incidents of comics being yanked back into the archives either because of an inadvertent early release or because a publisher no longer wishes to sell a certain title, but by and large there haven’t been any issues with the current model. Some previously voiced reservations about that arrangement, yet theoretical concerns are often ignored or quickly forgotten until they become a reality. And they became a reality over the weekend.

ComiXology’s servers crashed right after the announcement at South by Southwest of a free offering of 700 Marvel comics. It was an exciting idea for a sale and promotion, and I have no doubt everyone involved had only the best of intentions. However, demand surpassed server capacity. Access to comiXology’s comics reader and cloud storage was unavailable for an extended period — essentially, the front door to comiXology’s vaults couldn’t be opened because everyone was pressing up against it, so no one got anything.

What makes this incident such a valuable, but unfortunate, example is that even people going to comiXology to buy and/or read comics unrelated to the Marvel promotion were affected. Perhaps more damaging was that this blackout also prohibited sales of every publisher and creator with content distributed through comiXology. It was the equivalent of Diamond Comic Distributors having a power outage, causing every comic book store in North America to go dark. And then a Diamond representative showed up at everyone’s house and threw a tarp over their comic collection, preventing us from reading comics we’d already bought. The cascade effect reveals the delicacy of this system. The infrastructure comiXology uses puts immense responsibility and burden on itself, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

The original call to arms for digital comics was that the comic book industry needed an iTunes. As most people know, buying music from the iTunes Store provides you with an MP3 or m4a, or some other music file for your computer. Originally there was a limitation on how many computers could play each song file, but this restriction was eventually removed. While Apple recently began providing a cloud storage service, you can opt out of it. A similar structure is used for digital books. The file format EPUB also allows the option of digital rights management (DRM) to limit the number of computers that can read the file or other sharing restrictions.