Comic Book Guy: There's an App For That

Most people who sought to get their hands on an iPhone 4 now have one and with it possess a new world at their fingertips. Apple has pushed its App advertisements more than any other feature: need to find your bus times? There’s an App for that, etc, etc. Most media businesses have embraced the technology where possible and the publishing houses are no different with Marvel, DC and many others having entered the fray, continually digitising their back catalogue of comics for your perusal. Although better viewed on the larger iPad as opposed to an iPhone, it is still a delight to have the Amazing Spiderman adorn your screen as you swipe through the pages; but is this new format tangible?

There are a substantial number of people today who no longer own any physical music, not a single CD, as every album can be stored on a hard drive or in your Spotify account as an mp3, which certainly saves room. DVDs seem to be heading down a similar path with Blu-Ray splitting the publics opinion over its necessity and the more intriguing growth market is digital movie downloads (mp4). You can’t ignore the unstoppable nature of the Internet to provide unsolicited copies of the latest movie, but even legitimate download sites are becoming increasingly popular. With DVDs becoming cheaper to produce and extremely cheap to buy (a majority of people will now begrudge anything over £5) their resale value drops to pennies rather than pounds. So if you are not going to consider selling in the future, why not just store it digitally?

Thus the printed media also slowly struggles against the quicksand of the digital formatting process. E-books and digitised material have made a huge impact on the literary world and unfortunately the consequences have helped and hindered this area as much as music or film, as reader numbers may raise but actual sales of printed material continues to drop. Graphic Novels, however, have been one of the few formats to buck this trend and continue to grow in sales, but as more readers forage for the convenience of online media the future becomes questionable - will readers be content with an entirely online catalogue? Everything evolves; people, technology, business, but at what cost? Will new media live alongside old or do we give with one hand and take away with the other? There’s no App for that.