Sutff and things....

[lithera]

I feel a bit dsconnected from the world today, as though I've been shifted to the left or something. It is a little odd.

I started really using my Kindle today. It is amazing how much free stuff there is out there for it. Really. I've already got at least the Kindle's worth in free classics downloaded. And there are free cookbooks and... Just a lot. (I'm going to read Pride and Predjudice again before the zombies version comes out.) My first non-free book is Palimpsest and wow is it good. I have NO IDEA where it is going but I'm loving how lush and yet precise the language is. What a great book to start with.

In other news, the Tron sequel has started filming in Vancouver and it sounds really cool. I mean... It sounds ... like Tron, which is really all I can ask for. (And tells me I should have spent more time in Hall H last year.)

Saturday, Warner Home Video announced details about Green Lanter: First Flight, to be relased on DVD and Blu-ray Disc July 28. The Wonder Woman movie did well enough that we're pushing forward. I want to watch the WW movie!

I'm seeing a lot of reviews on Watchmen and they're mostly positive. I am, however, also seeing a lot of comics fans picking it up for the first time and wondering what the big deal about it is. There are a lot of reasons Watchmen was a big deal when it came out and, for me, the biggest is context. I was too young to get my hands on it when they came out and I likely wouldn't have really appreciated it, either. It took me awhile, when I did, to understand what was going on since I was living in a post Watchmen (and to some extent that Frank Miller Batman book) world. The heroes in Watchmen challenged the idea of heroes. They killed, they had sex, they were not the best people in the world but they were remarkably human. (Except the one who wasn't, just to make the others seem even MORE so - even when broken.) So, I can understand why newer comic readers don't understand why it was a big deal. They see a lot of the things that were HUGE then every week in comics. (There are certainly other reasons it was a big deal but that's the one that stands out for me.) I think, from the reviews I've read, that this movie is going to try to push that line for hero movies in the same way the series did for comics. At least, that's my hope. I shall see on Friday.

Steve McQueen's grandson, strangely also named Steven McQueen, will play Jeremy in the CW pilot “Vampire Diaries”.

Some nice Terminator posters: http://www.latinoreview.com/news/bad-ass-terminator-salvation-posters-6297 There is a new trailer coming in front of Watchmen.

Lots of rumors continuing to swirl around the new Star Trek movie. Words about possible cameos of and such. We shall see. We shall see indeed. There is a new trailer coming in front of Watchmen.

DC announced at Wonder Con that Judd Winick is the new writer on “Batman” after “Battle for the Cowl.” Which means that I won't be touching the thing. His writting is hot and cold and mostly just meh. Also stated was that Cassandra Cain will not be a member of the Bat-family after “Battle for the Cowl”. *sighs* Ah well.

And scans_daily is gone. There is a lot of kerfuffle out there about who and how and why but ultimately, for me, this comes down to a old retail/new retail sort of situation. It is, mostly, the same issue as DRM but in the case of comics (and books) there isn't an easy way to rip every book or comic you have into a digital form and save it on your hard drive. If it were just like ripping a CD, the publishing industry would have run into this a lot earlier. There is no Napster for books, you know? Let me just say that I will never believe that free = bad. If someone likes what they read, they'll go looking for more of it. Making back catalog titles availble hurts no one and allows more people access to your work who might not have originally even wanted to look.

And to answer another question I'm seeing asked - If readers hate large crossovers so much, why do people keep buying them? Well, for one, if you don't buy it, often times you end up being entirely lost when it is inevitably mentioned in other places. And two, comics are a social thing in a lot of ways and you want to be able to talk about what everyone else is talking about - good or bad.

Comments

[sharkcowsheep.livejournal.com]

I'd like you to know that I just clicked the "I'd like to read this on Kindle!" thing for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, just for you.

Also, quit #@$%@$# reading or I'll have nothing left to birthday you with.

[lithera.livejournal.com]

*laughs*

AWESOME.

And... Dude. You have no idea how much I've been slacking on the reading front. I've read like 10 books all year.

[bubbledragonnet.livejournal.com]

The Kindle's not available on Amazon.ca, sadly.

I'm watching it pretty closely, though. The technology's fantastic and I honestly wonder how my mother'd take to it. She has a large library of murder/mysteries and constantly prowls for new books... and I think she's about read everything available at the Tisdale library.

Honestly, taking two of your topics together, when it becomes a: color and b: adopted by comics and the like, that's when it'll explode. Or at least I hope so.

[lithera.livejournal.com]

I know that Kindle's lack of international usability is something that is being looked at. I have no idea when something might happen, though.

There is color in Japan right now, actually. The
battery drains down too fast, at the moment, to really be portable. I'm sure it will be in the next year or two, though.

The problem is...

[thezzyzx.livejournal.com]

"Let me just say that I will never believe that free = bad. If someone likes what they read, they'll go looking for more of it."

...yes but what happens when "looking for more of it," just means finding more downloads rather than going to the comic store? That's what is killing music and if it reaches that point with comics, there isn't really a secondary market that can't be bootlegged like concerts are for music.

Re: The problem is...

[lithera.livejournal.com]

I don't think that is killing music. I think it is just in a transitionary state. I admit that I don't know enough about how much things cost in comcs for me to be able to go too much further down the path of what I think my solution would be here.

There are a lot of interesting things that happen when someone finds something that they like enough to be willing to support it but a lot of that only really works when there are the shortest number of steps possible between the person creating the content, whatever it is, any the person who wants it. The more peopel taking pieces of the pie, the less well it works.

Re: The problem is...

[wandelrust.livejournal.com]

Downloading music isn't killing music, it's killing the major labels. I think the overall numbers have gone down permanently, but once the world in general gets used to the new paradigm, you'll see things level off in a good place. In particular, you'll see a lot more small label and independent artists, because it's worlds easier to make your song downloadable over the web (or even iTunes) than to get it on the shelf at Best Buy.

As for comics, they're already changing, mostly because comics are now written with the assumption that they'll be packaged as a trade, often only a month after the end of an arc. And webcomics have proven that you can give away the product for free and still have people pay you for it. Penny Arcade, Order of the Stick, Ctrl-Alt-Delete and more all make enviable sums on their strip compilations, even though people can ostensibly get all that content online anyways.

Honestly, I think if Marvel and DC had a "read every book we put out this month, for free, on our website," business would be huge. The people who are buying comic books already would probably still do so, cause let's face it, we're those people. People who read only a few titles would get to read a bunch more, find some they like, and start picking up the back trades. And people who never read comics would get to see them, and probably most would ignore them. But maybe somebody reads something they like, and hey, customer you wouldn't have had before.

Re: The problem is...

[thezzyzx.livejournal.com]

I hope that you're right. I actually have a strategy for saving music that I need to write up one day that I think would work but I disagree with you about comic fans continuing to buy comics. I hate that I have 15 long boxes of comics in my house and I'd replace that with a kindle-esque device in a second. If the only way of doing it is free downloads, I'd be pretty tempted and it would be hard for me to go back to buying.

Re: The problem is...

[lithera.livejournal.com]

There are things I would continue to buy. I would continue to buy art from artists and paper copies to be signed bt writers. I would ABSOLUTELY buy a subscription to a digital copy that would be sent to a Kindle like device once a week. I understand that it would seriously hurt local comic books shops, which is a painful thing for me. I'm not sure what happens there.

Re: The problem is...

[lithera.livejournal.com]

That's it exactly. Don't make everything free ever but show that you understand the internet market, which is entirely the long tail. The long tail usually means that the big guys take a hit in the begining but the entire industry as a whole (including the itty bitty guys you'd never hear of before) tends to make more money.

[arithon.livejournal.com]

I didn't even notice it was gone right away. I had made a filter to let me view my friends more easily, and I filtered out my communities almost specifically because of the sheer bulk that scans_daily put up on my screen.

[fireballof3.livejournal.com]

Yaknow, I can appreciate wanting to kill scans_daily.

Every D&D book is out on Torrents / scribd.com either day of or days before they go on sale, and that kinda torqs me off.

Also, something like scans_daily kills the market for the compiled trade paperbacks that have been keeping the comic market alive for a while now.

"free on the internet" isn't free for the people who originally made it.

[wandelrust.livejournal.com]

See above for most of my take. I think scans_daily was perhaps more completist than was healthy, but I don't think it kills the market in any sense. You lose some sales from people who see no need to buy the product now, but you also gain some from people who say "Huh, that looks cool, I'd like to read the rest on the bus, hey I wonder what else that artist has done?"

I look at D&D books online (or, more frequently, sipping coffee at B&N) to see if they're doing anything I'm interested in, but mostly I'm just frantically buying up everything 3.5 I can these days before they disappear forever. If I had no access to them outside of purchasing them outright, I'd either give them up for lost, or buy one book, be annoyed, and give them up for lost (which is pretty much what happened when I bought the 4.0 core books). At least now, I may look at PHB2 online or in the store, and say "Hey, there's a couple of good ideas in here."