But oh boy, I’ve started noticing lately. So when Amazon completed its integration of Comixology in February, it took me a little while to notice. Penguin Random House didn’t even mention Amazon when apologizing to readers and booksellers for the broken embargo.Īmazon’s increasingly outside role in digital publishing had led me to try and cut back on using its services. In 2019, Amazon shipped numerous copies of the sequel to Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale a week in advance, and despite an uproar from independent booksellers, it suffered no issues with the publisher, Penguin Random House. Amazon is so large it can regularly use its size to pressure publishers or ignore them. They’ve succeeded entirely due to their size - not their quality. If you think the enormity of these marketplaces would mean Kindle or Comixology were the best, you’d be sorely mistaken. Amazon’s e-readers are the most widely purchased in the US, with Rakuten’s Kobo line of e-readers (Rakuten is the largest bookseller in Japan) and Barnes & Noble’s line of Nook e-readers trailing behind. Kindle, meanwhile, has maintained a de facto monopoly in the digital books space in the United States. If you read comics and want to avoid the issues of storing your physical collection, Comixology has, until recently, always provided a pretty solid catchall alternative. If you don’t want to pay for individual monthly subscriptions to publishers, it’s the only per-issue supplier of digital comics from a number of major publishers, including DC Comics and Image. Apparently, if you let one company acquire a near-monopoly in the digital books and comics spaces, it will do terrible things that make the experience worse.įor those of you who aren’t big comic nerds, Comixology is the largest marketplace for digital comics. It has taken two distinct mediums - digital comics and digital books - and smashed them together into an unholy blob of content that is worse in every single way. But this year, Amazon changed things - incorporating Comixology’s digital marketplace directly into the Kindle ecosystem and totally redesigning the Comixology app. Amazon had acquired the app way back in 2013, and apart from removing the ability to buy comics directly from the app, it left it untouched for nearly a decade. In February of this year, Amazon finally completed its consumption of the once independent app for downloading comics, Comixology. Her work has also appeared in the WSJ and Wired. She oversaw consumer tech coverage at Gizmodo for five years.

By Alex Cranz, managing editor and co-host of The Vergecast.

Comixology and kindle