Amazon's greed just ruined comic books

this video is sponsored by henson shaving more about that after wait what what's happening no no no no no no oh why is it like this this is ugly sinned right now this is broken we'll put this here that doesn't make sense it's so janky oh wait i can't organize this great and now i just deleted everything what is the purpose no who does this help no [Music] hi what the hell is happening at amazon so just last month amazon decided it was too costly to have two separate digital reading platforms so comixology a digital comic book reading app would have to merge with kindle an ebook reading app did they combine the best of both worlds no that would be a good thing and why would anything like that ever happen instead they threw out almost everything functional about the comixology app and replaced it with a buggy re-skinned kindle app that's bloated with redundant and entirely pointless features that also don't work and right now that's the best way to read digital comics because if you try to read them on your desktop or web browser your experience will be unbearably laggy janky and even completely unreadable at times it's honestly astonishing how badly amazon screwed up a thing that's been pretty much perfected over the last decade but alas the entire landscape of digital comics from buying them selling them and even simply reading them has now all changed dramatically and it's bad for everyone in almost every way let me explain [Music] first of all do you know what comicsology is that feels important so for over a decade comixology has been a website and app that has effectively had a monopoly on digital comics sales as far as i'm concerned apps like marvel unlimited and dc universe infinite allow you to pay a subscription to stream their library of digital comics but it's almost exclusively older stuff if there's a brand new comic book coming out this week that you want to read well marvel's not gonna add it to their digital library until at least three months later and dc won't add it to theirs until at least six months later so your best bet to acquire a digital copy of a brand new comic book the day it also comes out in stores is through comixology because we support buying media legally around here if you can but i'm also i'm going to talk about piracy later in this video as well a little bit of quick history comixology was founded in 2007 but it was originally just a site for comic book fans to rate and review comics that they've read and get information about upcoming releases but everything changed in 2009 when the fire nation attacked now that's when they launched comics by comixology it's their digital comics storefront and digital reader fans for the first time could now buy digital copies of comic books online and read them online via the comixology website or mobile apps and the app thing actually does play a huge part in this story when apple released the ipad in 2010 comixology exploded in popularity it was described as the itunes for comics you browse the app for what you want to read purchase any issues and you start reading instantly via their incredibly polished reader i mean every major publisher was getting on board and even if they had their own standalone app like marvel and dc their digital reader platforms were still built by or licensed from comixology's digital reader because it's just great i mean it's it's near universally loved by comics fans and it feels like it was built by comics fans who wanted a great reading experience across all devices and one of the standout features of this reading platform was guided view where you could read a comic panel by panel now for this closure and this is maybe a rant for another day but i do have some issues with reading a comic in guided view but it's mostly just a preference thing like i don't know i feel like the best artists put a lot of thought into panel layouts and structure and scale and viewing panels one at a time so that each image fills the entire screen might take away from some of the visual storytelling of the page as a whole but again i get it a lot of people read digital comic books on their phone and the screens aren't nearly big enough to take in the whole page at once necessarily so i get it zooming in it helps but even if you are like me and you don't like guided view you can just turn it off and read the comic book however you want so either way it's a great reading experience or at least it was a great reading experience by 2014 comixology was thriving selling books online who would have thought of that so obviously amazon swooped in to acquire it and this is when we get our first glimpse at the subtle yet slightly scummy and money-hungry changes that jeffy bees would make to the beloved comics platform like hey did you know that the folks behind comixology helped build a bunch of tools into their site to help local brick and mortar comic book shops stay in business they fully recognized that digital comic sales would almost certainly eat into the sales of physical comics so they wanted to work with local comic shops to help them stay afloat amidst the changing landscape one of the ways they did that was by building a system where physical comic shops could sell digital comics through comixology and the shop would get a percentage of the sale that's honestly really nice and thoughtful now i haven't been able to find too much information about this but it appears that amazon likely abandoned this program when they acquired comixology i could be wrong though and if i am let me know in the comments but it would not surprise me if one of amazon's first business moves was to cut ties with any sort of goodwill initiative they had with their competitors or people they saw as their competitors however the bigger scandal that happened around this time was when amazon made it so readers could no longer purchase comics through the comixology app i remember this this is one of my first core memories with comixology to buy and read comic books on your phone or tablet you first have to go to the comixology website on your computer log into that buy the comics that you want then go back to whatever device you actually want to read the comics on and download them and then finally you can start but the app still had a browse feature where you could see new comic releases and you couldn't act on it in any capacity it was super annoying and amazon did this for a ton of their products you want to buy an ebook well you can't do it from the kindle app that would be easy buy a digital copy on amazon and then send it to your phone you want to buy an audiobook first listen to literally any podcast to get a coupon code then go to the audible app and just kidding you can't do that from the app either you get on get on your computer and then spend a credit to get a book that and then send that to your phone thankfully at least a few of these annoyances have been fixed in recent years but oh boy did it take way too long and i imagine the only reason that amazon did any of this was to avoid having to pay apple a percentage of their sales right because if a customer makes an in-app purchase on ios apple gets a pretty hefty cut of something like 15 to 30 percent of the sale is that greedy yes but i'm not gonna side with amazon here either because another reason they purposely made the ios apps worse was because they were selling their own line of fire tablets fire is the name of the tablets it's not an endorsement by me these tablets are fire dude so you have to think right if you're looking for a tablet to read comics on and one of them has a more streamlined integration with comixology because they own comixology while the other one is a lot more cumbersome you might be more likely to go for the one owned by amazon again i'm not taking sides here good lord i think my neighbors are playing fortnite or something and they're being really loud now again i'm not taking sides here right i think apple and amazon are both greedy corporations which is a redundant phrase i bring it up because i remember at the time a lot of people being annoyed but ultimately on amazon's side which is wild to me why would you ever be on amazon's side about anything i will say though i did find one article about this situation from 2014 and the opening line is basically the thesis of this entire video and so as we could have predicted amazon rex comixology don't know why i just do that accent there all that being said there was precisely one thing that amazon got right when they took over comixology and it involves a scandal that happened the year prior in 2013. it's time to talk about the crash oh by the way the tea i'm gonna be drinking today was sent in by a fan thank you very much it's an herbal tea i believe it's called ginger crystals and yes i am drinking it out of a luke's diner mug don't tell luke he will get mad at me please send me more tea so that i can drink some in future videos i have a p.o box in the description and uh if you send me stuff let me know if it's okay for me to mention you by name oh that's still so hot back to the video okay so the crash right around the tail end of 2012 marvel was going through a soft relaunch of their comics called marvel now this is where we got comics like superior spider-man all new x-men matt fraction and david aha's hawkeye and that uh short moon night run that made me fall in love with declan chalvey's art style but is now poisoned by warren ellis's predatory and abusive lifestyle moon knight the moonlight show looks good though i'll probably make a video about that so as marvel was launching these new comics they were running a promotion for readers who might be curious to check out marvel comics for the first time so on marvel's apps which again were and still are i think powered by comixology they allowed all of their fans to read over 700 first issues of their comics for free for 48 hours it did not make it to 48 hours just an hour or two after the announcement so many folks sprinted to marvel's apps to download their copies of 700 free comics that the comixology servers crashed and importantly this didn't just affect people who were wanting those free marvel comics it affected everyone if you were trying to read your dark horse or image or dc comics or even other marvel comics that you bought previously through comixology well guess what you can't now rightfully so there was a lot of backlash to this fans realized that if comixology ever permanently shut down where would all of their comics be could they still access the hundreds or even thousands of purchases that they've made over the years if this crash is any indication probably not now this is not a new question these days we're all having conversations and debates around physical versus digital media a lot of people simply feel more comfortable owning physical media when possible because at least they don't have to worry about this exact scenario right it doesn't matter if hbo max crashes i can still watch the live action scooby-doo movies in their correct order because i have little plastic discs that play them whenever i want which is every night before bedtime that being said i am the kind of person who buys almost all of my comics digitally through comixology and before you put me on blast in the comments for not buying physical comic books i would simply like to gesture to this one bedroom apartment that i work from and live in along with my partner and two cats where do you expect me to put all the comics i read in the fridge i'm already keeping two-month-old celery in there i don't have the room but even if a comic book fan wanted to buy comics physically there still might be scenarios where they aren't able to do that they might not live in an area with a comic book shop it might be too expensive to ship comics to where they are or they might be in a country that doesn't physically sell the comics they want to read and to that extent digital comics are also great for independent publishers who might not have the overhead for physical printing and distributing simply put digital comics make comics as a whole more accessible until you can't access them and that is what people freaked out over when comixology crashed so to prevent this problem from happening in the future comixology under amazon rolled out a genuinely thoughtful and forward-thinking initiative customers could now download drm free backups of the comics they purchase this meant that instead of always having to go to the comixology website or app to read your comics you could download the comic files to your computer and read them copyright free however you want forever even if comixology crashes or disappears or your internet gives out or whatever you bought these comics the files are on your hard drive now they are yours now this feature was only available if a publisher allowed for it and definitely not everyone did marvel for example would never let people download copyright free files of their comics why someone could upload it to the internet and then others could nab it for free you wouldn't download a comic book would you good thing that's a practice that definitely doesn't happen these days because marvel stop did great job but look a lot of notable publishers did allow for readers to download their comics and it was one of the truly great things that amazon ever did with comixology there were some other good things though right in 2016 they launched their own comic streaving service called comixology unlimited i've not really used it but i mean the deal seems pretty solid let's see in 2018 they launched a line of original creator-owned comics which i haven't really heard too much about until last year when scott snyder signed on to co-create eight titles holy cow that's fun however after their initial changes jiffy bop largely left to the team at comixology alone they never really implemented a ton of new features into the apps or website comic reader but i mean that was fine right it all worked it was good and as the saying goes if it ain't broke [Music] but it is costing you marginally more to upkeep even though you're one of the wealthiest corporations in the world then you gotta fix it obviously just recently in february of 2022 amazon decided to fully absorb comixology to basically be a small branch of the larger kindle bookstore and you can tell exactly when this happened because twitter was furious about it by the way that's scott nicewander on twitter and tiktok and instagram all those places give me a follow that'd be great thanks additionally the comixology website would have to merge with amazon.com and as a fun game some users entire libraries have been deleted with the switch forcing them to redownload their entire library of comics or even repurchase them if their account got all screwy the people it affects are seemingly random good luck and hey are you worried about all the comics that you've pre-ordered don't be amazon has cancelled all of them for you but don't worry you can always re-subscribe to an ongoing comic book series as long as you live in the united states if you're a comic book fan who lives anywhere else besides this obviously very good country that we live in then guess what amazon has already canceled all of your digital comic subscriptions you can't pay for that kind of convenience literally we will not let you pay for it that's right the website where someone could subscribe to get a box of 16 reusable cleaning clothes delivered to their door every month won't let people outside the us subscribe to digital comics anymore but hey forget about new comics it's still just as easy to read the old comics that you've already purchased just click on the title you want to read and hey this doesn't look like the old comixology browser comic reader it's much better just clunk your way through page by page using the arrow keys or if you like trackpad gestures try a two-finger swipe to the next page it'll take a full three seconds before anything actually happens but that's more time you can spend admiring your comic no need to speed run through art no more worrying about double page spreads now amazon just shrinks them down to fit on one page for your convenience you see wanna zoom in on those words that you're having trouble reading no you don't there's no way to zoom in or out are you a person who enjoys comixology's much praised and beloved guided view for reading comic books panel by panel because it's not built in at all anymore not in the browser anyway you're gonna need an app for that are the apps good before we get into the apps i just want to do a quick editor's note about the web browser reader it seems like they fixed a handful of things while also introducing a couple of new problems that i want to point out real quick so double page spreads are still busted they look really weird but now you can pinch and zoom in on them and the text gets a little bit sharper it's still really weird that they display this way the two-finger scroll actually does nothing now and they've implemented guided view however it's guided view per page it seems which is very weird so i can double click inside of here number one it highlights everything uh which is not great looking and also as you can see it's per page so i can i can do two different pe it's like it only works on one page at a time while still displaying the other one and then it's it still highlights everything it's so i don't know it's very bad so i guess kudos to them for fixing some stuff but it's still definitely extremely wonky anyway back to the video as i mentioned the comixology app now shares the same code base as the kindle e-reader here are the things that i like about it you can create bookmarks in comics to remember important sections i see this genuinely coming in handy for research purposes end of list the new app has a table of contents navigation menu which makes sense for books but why not just disable that feature on comixology the main use of this menu for ebooks is to outline their chapters individual comic book issues do not have chapters see now you might think that this actually could be a useful feature for volumes of comics right collected storylines entire graphic novels etc i think you would be right but it's not implemented there either but okay infinity gauntlet is a fairly old comic book maybe they're only going to implement this new feature into new releases let's check out field tripping volume one it's a comixology original title that came out last month collecting the first five issues of the series surely the team who executed this new reader in the comixology app would want their own newly released comixology produced comic books to make use of all of their latest features in the app right well that's disappointing at least this menu also has options for me to skip to the cover of the comic or the beginning of the comic wait how are those two different things let's see tapping on the cover brings me to yeah all right that makes sense so scroll ahead again and tapping on beginning brings me to oh they're the same thing they have two buttons that do the same thing now that's handy now again these buttons make sense on actual ebooks where the cover takes you to the cover obviously and the beginning takes you to the introduction usually past all the legalese i mean i would even forgive them if tapping on beginning literally just took you to the first page of the story past the cover at least then these options would do different things the only thing that is useful in this menu is the about this book button but those details are also available by tapping on this little information icon so it's like just get rid of this menu if it's not actually going to be used for anything except two instances of redundancy also why are the pages such low resolution when you scroll through them it zooms out like five percent but then suddenly the comics are made up of 10 pixels stretched across the entire screen it makes sense to lower the resolution in gallery view right the images are much smaller here but if you already downloaded the comic to my tablet then why do you have to make it look like garbage when i'm scrolling through this way what if i'm trying to find a specific time a character says something i can't read this even just the look of the scrolling feels dated to me why is there so much empty black space between the edge of the page and this teal surrounding border box it looks so much cleaner on something like marvel unlimited where nearly every inch of space is utilized even dc infinite looks better than comixology and i hate this tiny little gallery viewer i can't see don't worry though it looks much worse in landscape just look at all of this wasted space and here's another thing that confuses me some of the books are titled with prime reading and others with comixology unlimited i have no idea what qualifies some comics as one but not the other currently i do not have comixology unlimited so i would expect that i wouldn't be able to read anything in this section but hey look there are in fact a smattering of titles labeled prime reading that i can actually read i guess because i have amazon prime and then there's this volume of doom patrol that isn't labeled with anything above it and it doesn't look like i could read it even if i had comixology unlimited so i guess i would have to buy this issue which is fine but why is it in the section specifically for comixology unlimited if i can't read it through comixology unlimited also how do i even subscribe to comixology unlimited i don't think there's any way to do it from the app that's pretty much par for the course at this point there was nothing in my account settings and when i tried to read a book that was only available through comixology unlimited i could only download a sample and at the end of that sample it prompts me to learn more so yeah sure i tap on that and it just took me back to the books info page where i started i had a thought though that tapping on this comixology unlimited logo would do something helpful but it just zooms in on the app for some reason i don't know why that would be a useful feature hello yet another editor's note so if you are on the library section pinching and zooming uh changes how big your covers are in your library so you can display them as big or small as you want however if you're in the discover tab pinching and zooming just pinches and zooms in really far in on the page so you can scroll about like this if that's handy to you that seems seems good good stuff you know what let's just go back and oh god why was that so clunky everything in this app is so janky i'm just trying to decide if i want to read through the seminal peanuts comics but when i go back hoof that is sloppy the entire app feels like it's held together with the world's worst tape when i was scrolling through field tripping volume 1 a few minutes ago it randomly decided to show me the cover of the comic again for some reason thank you for stopping my reading experience by reminding me what i was already trying to read and you want to know the worst part all i've touched on right now is the ipad app which right now is the best way the best way to read your comixology library the desktop reader is just the kindle app but at least it's one step above the web browser because it has guided view for those who want that but it still has no idea how to handle double page spreads nor is there a way to zoom in here either to put it in the most simple terms i can think of this comic book app is no longer designed for reading comic books the problem is textual books and comic books are very different media i didn't think i would have to say that out loud it feels incredibly obvious you can't just slap the same reader on both and hope to make a good experience for everyone but okay silver lining here it sounds like at the very least if i am able to read comic books on my desktop still then that means that the comics i download are still drm free copies right amazon led the charge on that front years ago it would be pretty scummy if they took that back and made it so the only way you can read comics that you bought is through their terrible apps and website that feels like it would rekindle pun intended the fears that fans previously had about not being able to access their purchased comics on their own terms you know where this is going yep no more copyright free pdfs of the comics that you bought that you can store on your hard drive and read however you want and you know what that's for the best right because we wouldn't want anyone uploading them to the internet and engaging with piracy now would we would we it's been said before because it's correct that piracy is a distribution problem if media companies provide their comics or movies or games to everyone in an easily accessible and frictionless way most people will be totally okay with paying for that media or service in fact here's a rare time where i'm about to praise some giant corporations i feel gross already indulge me so one of my favorite joint ventures in recent memory has been movies anywhere it's a free service that syncs all of your digital movie purchases across apple google amazon voodoo and a whole bunch of others under one account meaning if i purchase a digital movie from amazon it will show up in my itunes library automatically and on youtube where you can like this video and subscribe if you're enjoying it i don't need to purchase a second digital copy of a movie that i already bought a digital copy of i can watch that movie anywhere i'm i'm not sponsored by movies anywhere and just to prove that i will insult them real quick i think the font on their logo looks like a minimalist version of the default premiere pro font and i don't like it it's yucky my overall point with that quick tangent is that i am much more comfortable purchasing movies digitally these days because i know that i can access my library from any number of services and if one of them goes down then i know it's still shared across at least a handful of others it's convenient it's accessible it's everything the new digital comics landscape is failing at right like this this feels like what amazon is trying to do with all of their disjointed reading services merge comixology with kindle with amazon prime reading to try and unify your library of purchases and create a streamlined reading service under one roof but right now anyway it feels way more confusing than ever even just from an organizational standpoint it's a mess my kindle library is bloated now with all of the comics i have ever bought through comixology why in the world is there no smart organization that automatically filters books and comic books into their own distinct collections finding anything here is a truly terrible experience but let's go further let's get a little dangerous here let's wade into some murky law waters some lotters if you will you do not have to but you can video creators like me but legally distinct from me often pirate movies and shows to use in our videos as a completely hypothetical example for this video right now i personally would feel morally fine using clips from a pirated copy of the disney channel original movie can of worms a film i previously convinced myself didn't actually exist and was just something i hallucinated as a small child you see i already pay a monthly subscription to disney plus i am paying for access to can of worms completely legitimately and i'm happy to do so because it's a convenient service that allows me to watch the scene where the alien eats a corn on the cob so i don't feel bad about also downloading a pirated version from which to pull clips for this video i was that did that sentence make sense i like froze for a second trying to calculate if my words were in the right order however i will admit that there are times in the past when i have pirated things that i haven't first purchased legally because they're not available for me to purchase legally anywhere i cannot tell you how many times in previous videos i have had to pirate old comic book issues because the publisher usually dc comics refused to put them online anywhere if you go back and watch some of my really early videos you can see how many images i pull that are just awful fan scans of silver age comic books that simply weren't available for me to buy legitimately there's a lot of them that still aren't available for me to buy legitimately like there were times when i would catch myself angry furious like screaming at my computer just just let me buy the comics that i want let me give you my money and if you find yourself shouting that while watching some of my videos then go check out my patreon thank you very much my point is i had to resort to piracy on a few occasions because of some corporation's terrible or even non-existent distribution of digital media and that's what it all comes down to right amazon clunkily attempting to merge comixology with kindle has made an experience that at least right now is truly so janky and cumbersome that more people are going to turn to piracy because it probably feels easier than dealing with this mess and legally i do have to say that i really don't condone that but at the same time i do understand it and i hate that the people who are gonna feel it the most is not gonna be amazon it's gonna be the creators of those comics yeah i haven't even gotten to how creators are getting screwed over in all of this okay so creators used to be able to sell their own comic books on comixology through a program called comixology submit which split the royalties of the comics 5050 between the creators and comicsology but now that comixology has merged with kindle creators now have to submit their works through kindle direct publishing which is a 3565 split in favor of amazon obviously amazon's greet is more transparent than most pngs on google images and to make things worse because hey we've got lower to sync independent comics creators who were already selling their comics on comixology now need to resubmit every single issue through kindle direct publishing if they want to continue earning the royalty payments on their comics once again the only one benefiting from this entire disaster is not the fans not the readers not the creators it's just amazon it's just it's so frustrating it's clear that none of these changes were made to benefit the end user right the reading experience is awful entire features are missing everything just looks bad and clunky and for what because jeff bezos thought having two different platforms for two different art forms cost a couple bucks more than the gold hoarder was willing to spend this entire ordeal has just been a massive step backward for reading digital comics more than that right like what was once a pretty dang good way of buying comics subscribing to and pre-ordering comics browsing through your collection discovering new stories and creators and immersing yourself into the fantastic worlds and stories that can only be told through the medium of comics now it just it feels worse than ever this whole endeavor feels rushed and thoughtless and i can only hope that it improves over time but there's there's really no incentive for that to happen it still holds an effective monopoly over digital comic sales and now it's cheaper for amazon to maintain and that's the only thing that really matters right and so as we could have predicted amazon wrecks comicsology all that being said there is precisely one thing that jeff bezos and i have in common and it's that we like to keep the tops of our heads nice and shiny and smooth and that's where today's sponsor henson shaving comes in hi i'm a very important business person and it's important that i look professional every day so that i can impress my co-workers how do you think i look today boss thank you for the compliments it's because i have a nice smooth shave thanks to henson shaving a smooth shave makes me feel my most confident but it's only possible with a high quality and thoughtfully crafted razor and that's exactly what the folks at henson shaving have created i mean look at this thing it looks like something they'd use in space which makes sense actually henson makes their razors in canada at an aerospace machine shop that has also made parts for the international space station the mars rover and satellites and they've brought that out of this world machining to this plastic free all metal built to last four decades razer let me hit you with some shaving facts real quick shaving facts did you know that the more a blade is exposed the more flex it can have and that those flex can lead to 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it doesn't slip out of my hand the head also has these built-in channels that easily remove a hair and shaving cream when you run it under a sink are you getting it yet all of the clever engineering that goes into this razor is in the head and the handle the blade is just a regular blade they're the same recyclable inexpensive ones you can pick up literally anywhere including amazon look i can get a subscription to 50 razors delivered to my house every month if i wanted to but i still can't buy digital comic books if i live outside the united states wild stuff henson also sells their own blades if you want to buy through them instead of jeff in fact tap the link in the description and use code nerdsync to get a free 100 pack of razors delivered to you when you purchase your henson razer once again tap the link in the description use code nerdsync buy your razer you get a hundred free blades how awesome is that and checking out the sponsors for my videos really does help me out as well so thank you all for doing that this was a bit of a different video for me so if you're new to my videos i usually talk for like 40 minutes about incredibly niche nerdy things uh so well i guess this video isn't that different after all if you like this video the best thing that you can do is share it with someone who you think will also like it help grow the channel a little bit thank you to my patrons who support my videos over at patreon.com nerdsync these are their names and i adore every single one of them you can become a wonderful nerd and get your name here by supporting me at five dollars a month or higher i'm trying to hit a thousand patrons this year and right now we're at 700 so let's keep it going once again my name is scott reminding you to explore your favorite art through curiosity and vulnerability see ya you

Channel: NerdSync

Views: 163,204

Keywords: nerdsync, comics, comic books, superheroes, marvel comics explained, dc comics explained, comic misconceptions, video essay, superhero, marvel, dc comics, explained, analysis, comics explained, Scott Niswander, amazon, jeff bezos, comixology, comicsology, digital comics, digital comic books, comixology update, amazon Comixology, history of Comixology, amazon wrecks comixology, ComiXology Originals, comixology reader, comixology app, comix ology, amazon update, Jeff Bezos, update

Id: GvTMMB8XNQY

Length: 39min 9sec (2349 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 20 2022