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it's so good when an important voice in the business shed some balanced light on a controversial topic like this. Warren Ellis had this to say in his Q&A thread at Millarworld:
It bears watching, but only from the initial understanding that there's not a damn thing that can be done about it.
Most comics file-sharing right now is being done through Bit Torrent, which is an excellent app with one fatal flaw: people. For those who don't know it, it's a "swarming" file-sharing system -- the more people handling the file at the same time, the faster the download. The thing is, something like 90% of users close BT after they've downloaded the file. In practise, a BT file has an average active life of somewhere between four hours and one week. Bit Torrent seems to resist centralisation, and so the chances are good that many if not most of the Bit Torrent files active today will have vanished by this time next week.
All of which is to say -- BT/digitised comics are not an economic threat to the comics industry right now.
If CDisplay, the freeware digital comics reader, really catches on, then that's the Winamp for comics. I find it a bit clunky.
It's possible that CDisplayed comics could erode the market for singles. I have my doubts. But I'm watching it with interest. |
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