ComiXology RIP
Do. Not. Try. For. 30-Days!
Or any amount of time because Amazon has finally and officially pulled the plug on the Comixology app.
ComiXology used to be something halfway decent back when the Big Two were halfway decent. It started life as an online community that would spot interesting upcoming releases and build pull lists for the brick-and-mortar comic book shops back when they existed.
It also had some tools for the aforementioned brick-and-mortar comic book shops to help raise their online presence. Then around 2009 ComiXology went one step better and launched a digital comic book reader and a digital comic book store. For a while it was looking like this was the future of comic books.
I’ll be honest, I’ve never been a fan of their reader, it’s guided reading expieriance has always been too clunky for my taste and I’m hardly alone there but for a while there was a huge amount of interest because this was what was going to save comics.
In 2013, Amazon launched Jet City Comics and later that year it crashed and burned. Jet City was an attempt by Amazon to force it’s way into Market dominance by publishing a line of exclusive comic books that were written by New York Times best selling authors like George RR Martin and Neal Stephenson, as well as some inhouse indies that are tied to Amazon by an umbical cord like Hugh Howey and Marko Kloos.
It was basically a prestige comics format by a company that was familiar with traditional publishing but not with the comic book market. Their headliners were novelists, not comic book writers. And no, their were no superheroes.
After Jet City augered in Amazon snapped up ComiXology and proceed to Amazonize it. ComiXology Unlimited, launched in 2016, was a service that delivered you digital access to most everyone’s comic books for one low price.
This was at a time when the Big Two went mega-Woke and interest in traditional comics cratered. The service was losing Amazon money but not too much. However, after Covid hit Amazon started pruning non-performers which ComiXology definetly was. They had first announced that the website would be shutdown but there was a lot of community backlash at the time.
However, there doesn’t appear to be much of any today. Yesterday’s announcement was noticed but wasn’t causing anyone to pull their hair out. The ComiXology URL now dumps you directly into the Amazon Kindle tab and the app itself will shortly be delisted from the App stores.
The lesson is obvious. If you are an entrepeneur and honestly care about the business you have created then under no circumstances sell it to something like Amazon. It’s only a matter of time before the ax falls.
ComiXology
2007-2023
