NOOKColor, digital comics just got a lot more interesting

Barnes & Noble just announced that the NOOKColor, an Andoid tablet fronted with a 7-inch touch screen, as part of their overall Nook eReading device line, has become their biggest selling product of all time. They sold their entire inventory of devices over the holiday season.
I don’t think there is any doubt that the market will have a ton of options available for tablet-based computing for reading digital texts. The major limit to them opening up the market for comics and graphic novels has been the lack of colour. With the exception of some Manga titles, most comics and graphic novels ship with colour panels. The end result is that most people aren’t going to be interested in downloading a heavily visual digital product that is going to look terrible on a grayscale screen. The growth of colour tablets and their steadily decreasing cost is nothing but good news for the digital comic marketplace. Keep an eye on the Fabler as we start building up the relationships that are going to let independents tap into that market.

The Fabler: Next Steps

I haven’t written a lot about The Fabler, but it is a new business that I’ve been rather proud to be involved in over the past year. It started with a discussion between myself and Bruno Steppuhn about the publishing industry, we both realized that it was changing rapidly. We had talked to a few publishers and printers down in the U.S. and they understood the shift as well, they just didn’t know which direction it was going. None of us thought it was going to die but we believed that the business was going to fundamentally change. We started to look at how social media technologies and new hardware were going to turn publishing into a very different kind of industry. We decided to figure out what that new industry was going to look like, raised some money and created our first shot at a social site that focused on digital viewing and print-on-demand for the comic book/ graphic novel community.

It gave us a chance to experiment with a very creative and demanding community. They were very vocal about the kinds of things they want to see for the future of comics. The creators wanted more creative control, more profit for the creators, engagement with their fans, distribution options, more profit…basically, they felt they were doing all the work, they should get more for it. The readers just wanted one thing, great art and great stories and a lot of choice. We put that all together into  The Fabler and won “Best Use of Social Media” at the 2010 MediaFresh awards, beating out a number of much better funded crowdsourcing and social media projects. We worked closely with ZenSoft Studios (check out their demo reel, great stuff!) to develop the site. The feedback we got gave us a lot of encouragement so we’ve continued our discussions with publishers and printers about what was going to be in the next version of The Fabler. We don’t think we’ve got everything right yet but there are a huge number of publishers that are looking for new solutions for their industry so we’re motivated to keep trying. Keep an eye out for updates in the New Year, I’m hoping to show you some pretty amazing stuff and explore some new business models that are going to let creative industries explode and reach every single audience member they can, anywhere in the world.