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David Steinberger: There have been two major companies, and several other smaller companies have been doing this kind of thing, but most notable, two major releases recently. The Iron Man Annual and Justice League of America, Generation Lost from DC, which was at $2.99, so a dollar less than print.

Douglas Wolk: No, it’s actually $2.99 in print too.

David Steinberger: Oh, it is same price? But will come down next week, I think, or next month for the first issue.


So we work with the publishers. We don’t tell them what to do so much, so I’m not really the one that makes that happen, we make it available for them to do it.

The way that publishers are kind of easing into it is, 'Okay; let’s see if this drives sales or takes away sales in print.' And the fact is, and forgive me, if anyone saw the panel earlier, the top 10 title in our app, which aggregates DC, Marvel and 38 other publishers, it's Wanted. Wanted number one through five is always in our top 10. It’s Hellboy, it’s occasionally Sandman; lately Neil Gaiman has been tweeting about the app.

These are not your usual comic book buyers. These aren’t Wednesday shoppers. These are people who are connecting to something going, 'Oh, cool, comics on the iPad. That’s awesome.' And then like, 'Oh wow! Wanted. That movie. Awesome. Let’s do it.' Kick Ass was a huge hit on comiXology.

It’s the same thing with the downloaders. Again, I think it’s legitimate for the publishers to go after these (pirate) sites.

I do. I think it’s a shame they can’t do it, especially in the case of scanlation, they can't do it in concert with offering out all this material legitimately. And that’s the real challenge. You can’t stop people from doing this. All you can do is try to make a legitimate channel, make it easy to find, and buy and make it available as cheap as possible to reward the work that goes into it.

IT'S (NOT) A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL: REACHING A GLOBAL AUDIENCE

Douglas Wolk: The question people keep arguing about is whether it’s legitimate for publishers to go after these sites. But the more interesting question is whether it does any good for publishers to go after them. Because that’s the problem the music industry faced. They went after file sharers because it was legitimate for them to go after file sharers -- and it did them very little good and a lot of harm.
Deb Aoki: Even if all the top 10 scanlation sites closed down tomorrow, scanlation will not go away. Everyone knows that.

But those aggregator sites made it a little too easy to find that stuff, you know? Back in the early days of anime/manga fandom, we used to have to work to get this stuff. I once had to send a scanlation group $50 to dub a VHS tape of an anime series that they fansubbed that I couldn't find anywhere else. Now anyone can get anything and it's gotten out of hand.

Jake Forbes: This isn’t just a scanlation thing, but I would be curious if you have any thoughts on global readership, and how comiXology relates to this. Scanlations and comics piracy cut through down all the red tape for international markets to make this content available to readers all over the world.

We always talk about how are we going to capitalize on our buyers in U.S. dollars, but for many scanlation sites, the majority of their readers are not in the U.S. These sites are exposing the English language version of manga to the biggest audience anywhere in the world. It’s making it available to readers in Southeast Asia, it’s going to South America, and so on. I don’t know how that will factor will affect American comics, so I was wondering if you have a response for that.

David Steinberger: Companies don’t often look forward well enough. So, here’s a really great example: I’m dealing with a potentially a really nice deal with manga publisher, but I can’t do anything in Java because they made a deal four years ago that they would only go exclusively with one company in anything that’s based in Java.

That means that they just didn’t think, 'Okay, this is a five-year deal, but what does that look like – what could possibly happen within the next five years?' Maybe the company they were dealing with, they thought they’d be around forever. This company is still around, but they’re just not doing anything. So that kind of thing applies to licensing deals as well.

In the physical distribution world, it’s much easier to do it the old way. Printed products don’t cross the border, and if they do, they have some extra costs. I think you’re going to see this again and again, but the problem is, companies move – commercial entities move much slower than technology.

You're going to see all these guys are now saying, not only do we have to think about digital distribution because of the iPhone, but now we’ve got the iPad. It's all happening so fast. No one saw that coming. We don’t really know what’s next and these things are worldwide. It’s painful to have to set things up so they're not available worldwide. Painful. The deals we have going forward are all going to be much more aware of the needs of an international audience. Our sales are at 41% out of the U.S. – outside the U.S.

Deb Aoki: I think that's happening now. I was talking to Kurt Hassler, the publishing director at Yen Press the other night. He was saying that Yen Press is going to publishing an online version of their Yen Plus magazine and make it available worldwide – it’s not region-locked, right? (shouts out to Kurt Hassler, who is in the audience)

Kurt Hassler: It’s available worldwide.

Deb Aoki: Worldwide -- that’s new. If you tried to read Rin-Ne on ShonenSunday.com, you can only read it if you were accessing it from the U.S. So the fact that Yen Press is making their manga magazine available to readers in any country? That is eye-opening. I was also talking with an editor from Japanese publisher Kodansha, and she mentioned that they are launching an online version of their Morning manga magazine, and they’re doing it in seven languages.