Three days ago, we brought you the hilarious story of Barnes and Noble getting all huffy that DC signed an exclusive deal for their most popular graphic novels to the Kindle Fire while the poor Nook was left with all the porn comics and crappy indie comics, so they pulled the entire list from their store shelves. And now Books-A-Million, which is pretty much just a Christian bookstore with a general interest section, is throwing a similar hissy fit.
As GS’s resident Nook owner/DC Defender, I’ve got two things to say to Barnes and Noble and BAM: first of all, I didn’t choose a picture of a barn door wide open for this post just because I’ve got a barn fetish. The time to make threats like this was probably before DC completely relaunched its books, having a huge month in print with runs they haven’t seen in years, but, although DC is sitting on actual numbers, a much, much bigger month in digital. The DC app was the number four highest grossing app on the iOS platform last month. We could be seeing an overall sales run of 300,000 to 500,000 for some of the biggest titles, possibly more. For a company like DC that’s struggled to push 50,000 of their biggest guns out the door on any given month, that’s huge.
And don’t think other publishers aren’t noticing. Image just went day-and-date with digital and suddenly Marvel, who I’ve been bitching about not supporting Android for MONTHS, has just shown up on the platform in a big, big way. Yeah, I’m sure that an Android app was being developed, but don’t tell me they didn’t rush it out after seeing DC do so well. Most comics watchers think every single publisher will be day-and-date before 2012 fires up.
In short, all the animals have left the barn and are currently headed for the next county: closing the barn door is a waste of time. Especially since all those books you banned? Your customers can hack their Nook and get individual issues off of Comixology. A quick scan shows the only two missing are “Watchmen” and “V For Vendetta”. And buying the individual issues at two bucks a pop is generally cheaper than buying the actual graphic novel. So they’re on the Nook: you just don’t get a slice.
Secondly, the stock Nook sucks ass for reading comics. No, seriously. It’s terrible. And I know this isn’t a limitation of the hardware because when I run Android on it, the comics look great. On the stock Nook software, they look like Tijuana Bibles and they take for-freaking-ever to load each page.
Of course, this also means that our friendly local comics shops will see more traffic to buy these books, so thanks!
[ via Bleeding Cool ]