What Amazon was thinking during the Comixology layoffs | Hacker News Reader

What Amazon was thinking during the Comixology layoffs

comicsbeat.com

62 pointsinvisiblesky31 comments

eBook reading has gotten truly painful the last few years - due to further segmentation and DRM. I've now completely changed what I do and bought an Onyx Boox (Air C for the curious).

Now, I buy whatever I want wherever I want it / is cheaper - I will not pirate literature. I then never download it from the retailer - I immediately go and pirate the thing I've purchased. It's actually just easier. It's easier for me to have a torrent server sync eBook/cbx/pdfs to a folder, that's rear-mounted in google drive and shows up on my device, than it is to deal with what app has what book. Add to this multiple languages and you can see why this becomes a bigger pain.

It could be a niche issue.. But it's also a reason that Kindle/Kobo just aren't big here in Israel, and Android tablets are.

I have an Onyx note air (2?) and it's been wonderful so far. I use it to read research papers, something that's impossible on my kindle. It's not just the screen size - the onyx boox has options to segment a 2-column paper into 4 quarters so that each page is a quarter of the pdf page and fills up the screen. This is something the kindle _could_ have done, but refuses to.

My gut feeling is that there is no overlap between everyone that gets inconvenienced by DRM crap and the people in high seas (you being the exception)

I wonder if publishers would actually save money by simply publishing a pdf/epub and save up on all the enforcement infrastructure/ip.

At least for software there is some evidence that the people pirating would never have bought it anyway, specially when they are struggling in developing economies.

"The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates."

I stick to buying DRM-free ebooks. That way, I can support authors by buying their books instead of pirating them, while avoiding dealing with DRM.

I usually buy from WeightlessBooks or Smashwords. Libreture maintains a list of places that sell DRM-free ebooks [1]

[1] https://libreture.com/bookshops/

Even DRM-free books I’ll often buy then torrent, since the download user flow is so awful on most major bookstores. For a while you could buy nominally DRM free books at Kobo but not download them except via device - maybe still the case, I didn’t try in years…

I do the same thing with movies + anime, I can + will pay for it but streaming is a no mans land for me. It's a useless product that provides no value, but an .mp4 or .avi file can be played back on any hardware I own, anywhere.

I can't even use crunchyroll. They don't have an app for my TV, and airPlay doesn't work at all

You're not missing much, the app on my TV is probably the slowest and most unresponsive thing I use

We need bandcamp for ebooks

I have watched this stuff, but only from afar, because I have a minority viewpoint I guess. I don't find reading comics on a tablet satisfying, my vision is just too poor, and so still mostly read comics on desktop.

To further improve the reading experience for myself I recently wrote a native, cross-platform, reader for desktop[0]. It will mostly appeal to people who still live in a file-based world (.cbz/.cbr/.cbx...).

[0]https://github.com/mftb0/cbxv-gotk3

> […] who still live in a file-based world […]

'Still' makes it sound like this is going away. I hope not. I don't read comics often, but when I do¹ I can't imagine doing that on anything but a large screen or on paper. Phones, tablets, and laptops are just too small. I really enjoy buying comics in large bundles in DRM free formats like those offered by Humble Bundle.

1: My comic reading habits seem oddly limited to comics written by Garth Ennis.

Ha! Cool, there's probably a few more of us reading on desktop than I think. I'll have to check out the Humble Bundle thing, I like Garth Ennis too.

My e-comics reading experiences:

* Kindle Fire HD10: acceptable. A little small.

* 14" 1080P chromebook in tablet mode: pretty good.

* 40" 4K monitor: great, including 2-page spreads, but not portable.

Interesting, ty. I never thought of the Chromebook option.

Latest release package doesn't seem to like Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. :(

    $ ./cbxv 
    ./cbxv: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.32' not found (required by ./cbxv)
    ./cbxv: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.34' not found (required by ./cbxv)

That being said, it compiled and runs fine after figuring out the missing (on my system) dev packages: libcairo2-dev, libpango1.0-dev, libgtk-3-dev.

Seems pretty nice, well done. :)

Any chance of pdf support?

My stuff is mostly a mix of .cbr, .cbz, and .pdf files. :)

Hey thanks! I appreciate the detailed feedback! I'll get this sorted on Ubuntu. As for pdf, definitely possible, just wasn't sure how many I would encounter in the wild.

I've been toying with getting back into reading comics for a few years, but haven't because I've had little faith in online readers. I seriously looked into buying a tablet just to read comics. Mainly when travelling and I'm too tired to read a book. But when I investigated the whole system (Amazon/Kindle/Apple store/Comixology) whatever just looked too obtuse and weird to use. I want something simple that allows me to find good comics and read them on a tablet without a bunch of bullshit. And I'm willing to pay for it.

It's so disheartening that between publishers, tech, and copyright madness we can't seem to figure this out.

Like most digital media, everything is gimped for copyright reasons. Often to the point where enjoying the actual media becomes close to impossible.

> I want something simple that allows me to find good comics and read them on a tablet without a bunch of bullshit. And I'm willing to pay for it.

Use the LibGen Comic search - https://libgen.ee/ (select Comics and deselect everything else), and then a Comic book reader that will open the CBR/CBZ files (renamed RAR and ZIP archive files), such as CDisplayEx - https://www.cdisplayex.com/

Instead of paying for it, pay it forward, and purchase comics not available and digitise or rip them to make them freely available.

I've sailed the high seas and still do, but I have to say that when I do it with comics, my heart hurts a bit. Unlike successful musicians and actors, comic writers and artists were already starving with the old model...

> Instead of paying for it, pay it forward, and purchase comics not available and digitise or rip them to make them freely available.

IMO paying it forward would be paying for it. Comics are not a lucrative business with a big production team. Independent comics are sometimes one person doing everything.

Although I have not used it lately, Tachiyomi has been a lifesaver for comics and manga.

To add to this, Amazon recently got rid of DRM-free stuff from Comixology.

Then as part of Kindle-unlimited, to fight Kindle-unlimited piracy, they rolled out a new drm system everywhere which took out DRM removal on purchased books in the crossfire.

Along with Amazon music changes preventing previewing songs before purchase I have no idea what's going on there. I guess streaming allows them to skim more from publishers/authors hence why they're pushing it so hard, readers/listeners be damned.

Comixology is going to have its lunch eaten by Naver's Webtoon and its alternatives. Disinvestment like this is only going to exacerbate the issue.

I try to un-amazon but currently have a kindle. Old paperwhite. Any thoughts on a comixology replacement?

There isn't really a direct replacement. Kobo and the other ePub stores often have trade paperbacks epubs and manga but not individual issues, sometimes the publisher/author will sell issues though.

I wonder how many of Comixology's issues also track the downfall of the American Comicbook Industry. Marvel, DC and other American Comicbook companies aren't exactly setting the world on fire with their sales. There have been months where a single manga volume will outsell the entire American industry.

Not your garden, not your walls.

A former employee has discussed his experience at comixology when amazon made them migrate to amazon's backend in a series of tweets: thread 1: https://twitter.com/CocktailsAndInk/status/16252333387419566... thread 2: https://twitter.com/CocktailsAndInk/status/16256237606854369... thread 3: https://twitter.com/CocktailsAndInk/status/16263421408076390...

Feels to me that to Amazon; Comics are subset, of the Books subset, of the Publishing subset, of the Store subset, of the Kindle subset, of whatever division subset of Amazon.

That is, not important enough to customize anything. Sad.

And yet, reading Comics is subtly, but importantly, different from reading a Book. I tried both Kindle and Comixology apps for reading a Comic a while back, and the Comixology App was a lot better.

But it seems this does not register at Amazon.

This thread isn't about any backend migration, but the switch from Comixology's own app to Kindle. Apparently it was a disaster and people were unhappy, but there's no indication in these tweets as to why. Was the engineering not good enough? Bugs? Bad product management? Unrealistic deadlines? Were the acquired engineers just waiting for their lock up periods to expire so they could quit? Was Amazon management deliberately sabotaging them?

I have seen all of these situations (and more) play out before, so it's never as simple as blaming a tech stack.

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