I’ve been watching CES news and almost every presentation, including the latest Honeycomb operating system from Google, has a sequence on digital books. You can catch it in this video clip.
Honeycomb is designed for tablets and should be an experience that is as good as the iPad. The question why aren’t they selling as much as the Apple product?
Well, I think the answer has a lot to do with how those companies are being run. Android has focused on making some great tech, a goal that they have definitely achieved. What they haven’t been quite as good at is focusing on how Android technology is going to mean you have a better/ cooler/ more creative/ less stressful/ “add in adjective” life. Apple aggressively went out and got a lot of fantastic content and created a market for a lot of great apps. Both of those made their hardware a part of the productive and recreational lives of a lot of people. Android is going to start thinking the same way and comics should be part of that strategy.
From the previous blog post it is obvious that Sony has taken an aggressive stance towards getting the best content it can for its e-readers. Nintendo is going to need to do the same thing if they want their e-book store to succeed on their new gaming hardware. It isn’t just about aggregating large collections of books either. Google has Google Books hooked into their Android tablets. You would think that a free book collection of that size would have readers buying up Android tablets all the time. This isn’t happening and what has happened is that Google has a collection of millions of books that most people don’t want to read. It isn’t about the most content, it is about the best content.
Comics are going to play a part in that strategy for the best content. The tablet that can access the best quality comics and provide the best reading experience is going to have another check mark next to it when buyers compare their options for purchasing a new tablet. There are a lot of solutions out there for buying and viewing comics from Comixology, Graphic.ly and The Fabler. Comixology has the largest collection at the moment and arguably the best quality content. Although the content is there I don’t think is that any tablet can claim that they’ve created the best comic viewing experience. Something to consider when manufacturers look for ways to differentiate themselves in the market.
I’m always interested to see how new technology can facilitate an existing experience or even change it. I’ll be keeping an eye on CES releases over the next few days to see if any tablet announcements might be thinking about how they are going to do that for the comic book.
