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A brave new world amazon1/20/2024 We had some competitors that were dictating the way things had to be done – we didn’t want to do that. We worked with them to make sure that the experience wasn’t just fit for us but fit for them as well. “We saw our publishing partners as partners. The company’s founders were very keen to respect publishers, giving them an equal footing and say in their emerging digital comics platform. It wasn’t the only thing that helped Comixology grow. The app itself was also particularly beneficial to those that lived beyond the reach of their local comic shop, frequent travellers, and more. Guided View had surprising benefits – including helping the sight impaired to continue to enjoy their weekly releases when traditional print became unviable. But if all you wanted to do was read the story, you could go panel by panel.” If you wanted to you could read it in full page mode, you could zoom in, you could pan around, you could do whatever you want. If you were on the subway or holding your baby you could read your comics with one hand, panel by panel, and zoom in. We start up at the top left and just move you around from panel to panel….We basically created a way for you to read with one hand on your iPhone. “We thought show you a little part of the screen at a time. It was labour intensive and not really scalable.” We had competitors that were basically chopping up the page into screen size chunks and in some cases redesigning it so that it would fit. “Guided View was a technology that comiXology created that allowed you to basically take a guided tour around the comic book page. John Roberts, in a 2022 interview, explains it: One of the things that helped them stand out from the crowd was their “Guided View” technology a simple yet extremely effective way in which readers could enjoy their comics panel by panel on the soon-to-be-ubiquitous digital small screen. They had initially begun trying to develop a web-based comics reader but the announcement of the iPhone made everything radically click into place: to develop a single app to buy and read your comics. It was a wild west of ideas.Ĭomixology was the brainchild of three people – John Roberts, David Steinberger (two lifelong fans on the medium), and analytics expert Peter Jaffe. Startups burst onto the scene with renewed vigour, birthing new apps aimed at disrupting perceived logjams in everyday life. The company was formed in 2007, in the same year as Apple’s unveiling of the first generation iPhone which marked the dawn of today’s portable smart-tech age. “Revolution” was definitely what made Comixology stand out from the crowd, making digital comics seem like a viable, even natural, reading experience. “the company that revolutionized the digital comics reading experience with their immersive Guided View technology and makes discovering, buying, and reading comic books and graphic novels easier and more fun than ever before.” The old comiXology logo prior to the Amazon merger An acquisition of – according to the Amazon press release at the time: When Amazon publicly announced its acquisition of the plucky startup. The first date that made this inevitable: April 10, 2014. Today only a handful remain, now rolled into the Amazon Kindle technical department proper, trying their best to do right by the promise of the company they helped build.īut maybe another date could be indicated in the downfall of Comixology. The old comiXology website, 2021įor staff, the end of Comixology could be the moment Amazon internally dictated the switchover to Kindle in a bid to reduce “duplication” of services ( which was announced to the public September 1, 2021), or perhaps Januwhen Amazon – in its bid to reduce ballooning costs from aggressive pandemic expansion across the board – laid off nearly the entire company of approximately 200 people. One could argue other dates for this end – for long time customers, that day came with the massive PR disaster that was the rollout of ComiXology 4.0 on Febru– which was promised as a leap in the platform but in reality was seen as a massive setback, forcing the fluidly functional code architecture into Amazon’s own proprietary Kindle format and the removal of the website – redirecting customers to Amazon’s own facsimile portal within the online store, which has struggled to catch up or match the (admittedly imperfect) Comixology storefront it replaced. The day set in stone as when Comixology (the app, the reader, the digital distribution service, the hallmark of what digital comics could offer) truly disappeared from the world, swallowed in its entirety into the Kindle app the brand name retained simply as a ghost in Amazon’s future efforts to half-heartedly shore up the near-buried comics side of the Kindle segment of its $1.52 trillion business empire.
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