In February of this year, Amazon finally completed the consumption of the previously independent application for downloading comics, Comixology. Amazon had acquired the app in 2013, and in addition to eliminating the possibility of buying comics directly from the app, it left it untouched for nearly a decade. But this year, Amazon changed things, incorporating the digital Comixology market directly into the Kindle ecosystem and completely redesigning the Comixology app. It has taken two different media: digital comics and digital books, and crushed them into a profane drop of content that is worse in every way. Apparently, if you let a company acquire a monopoly almost in the digital and comic book spaces, it will do terrible things that will make the experience worse.
For those of you who aren’t big comic book nerds, Comixology is the biggest digital comic book market. If you do not want to pay individual monthly subscriptions to publishers, it is the only provider of digital comics per number from a number of major publishers, such as DC Comics and Image. If you’re reading comics and want to avoid the hassle of storing your physical collection, Comixology has always provided, until recently, a pretty solid alternative.
Kindle, meanwhile, has maintained a de facto monopoly on the digital book space in the United States. Amazon e-readers are the most purchased in the U.S., with Rakuten’s Kobo e-reader line (Rakuten is the largest bookseller in Japan) and Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader line behind.
If you think that the enormity of these markets would mean that Kindle or Comixology were the best, you will be very wrong. They have been successful because of their size, not because of their quality. Amazon is so big that you can regularly use its size to pressure publishers or ignore them. In 2019, Amazon shipped numerous copies of the sequel to Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale a week in advance, and despite the bustle of independent booksellers, it had no problem with the publisher, Penguin Random House. Penguin Random House didn’t even mention Amazon when it apologized to readers and booksellers for the broken embargo.
Amazon’s increasingly external role in digital publishing had led me to try to reduce the use of its services. So when Amazon completed its Comixology integration in February, it took me a while to notice. But boy, have I been noticing lately?
It feels like when you go to the grocery store after moving the aisles
The new Comixology app is largely … annoying. That’s the best word for it. Everything you need is still there, but the design isn’t really intuitive and can make it difficult to navigate a large collection of comics (I’ve been using Comixology since 2011). It feels like when you go to the grocery store after moving the aisles. There’s still everything, but the change feels so dramatic after years of familiarity.
But where my local Food Bazaar will label the aisles, Comixology will not. There are no clear tags for useful built-in tools like its “Guided View”, which is designed to move smoothly from one panel to another by swiping your finger instead of each page taking up the entire screen. The guided view is still there, but the clear explanation of what it is or how to use it is gone. It is accessed by double tapping, which I only know because I was trying to access the menu to leave the book.
However, the real pain of the new Comixology experience is the integration of your store with Amazon’s largest store. Amazon has always been a struggle to navigate. There are fake products, sponsored ads, and sometimes even fake products in sponsored ads. When I went to book the new Poison Ivy series about the DC villain earlier this month, I came across ointments used to treat poison ivy rashes.
wanted to book the new poison ivy comic, but was violently reminded that Amazon ruined comixology (the comic he wanted is the third real book) pic.twitter.com/4tFemED9YP
– (@alexhcranz) May 11, 2022
Over the next three weeks, they fixed this search result. The new book is now the best result. The ointments come later. The rest of the Poison Ivy-focused books that DC has published over the years are now “under the fold,” hidden until you scroll over the sponsored junk you probably weren’t looking for.
I’m looking for comics.
Other popular heroes, such as Spider-Man, Captain America and Batman, return the results of the toys alongside the comics.
Comixology searches used to return comic book results.
And look, these search results weren’t exactly great before the merger. There must be a million variations on the Spider-Man title. If you’re looking for the number 10 of a very specific Spider-Man run, you’ll probably see a lot of results unless you add more to your query. But before Amazon’s merger, you weren’t dodging the results of TV shows, toys, basketballs, and anything else that Amazon thought a Spider-Man comic book search engine might want to buy.
Comixology searches used to return comic book results
If you use the service now, you are painfully reminded at all times that you are at Amazon’s home and will consider it more than just the one you want to buy. It’s annoying and nasty. And for months, I’ve been complaining to friends and reading about it as long as I agree and generally accept the nasty.
But last week, I wanted to read a book on the Kindle app. I hadn’t used it in a long time, preferring Libby when I could, but I knew I owned this book and I knew I wanted to read it. Just instead of coming across the myriad of books I’ve purchased over a decade using Amazon’s Kindle store, I came across the myriad of comics I’ve purchased over a decade using the Comixology store.
I swear I read high comics sometimes.
There is no way to filter comics from my Kindle app. They are always right there. The first one I saw if I didn’t buy a book that week. It’s annoying on my iPad Mini. It’s downright offensive on my Android E-Ink tablet and Kindle Oasis.
It doesn’t have to be that way either. Amazon is one of the largest and richest companies in the world. It has plenty of money for front-end UI designers. This could be fixed quickly. But I don’t think Amazon has any inclination. For the most part, Amazon is content to keep its e-book business, not being real leaders or good administrators. And it’s not just the bonehead design options that came up after merging their digital comic book and e-book stores that make me feel this way.
The Kindle e-reader line now feels painfully obsolete alongside something like Kobo Elipsa and Sage or basically the entire Onyx Boox line. These use the latest E-Ink screens and include great skills, such as faster refresh rates for web browsing and pen entry. The important thing about the Kindle line is that e-readers are relatively inexpensive and work with the Amazon store.
For the most part, Amazon is content to keep its e-book business, not being real leaders or good administrators.
Amazon has also left its main book-recommending app, Goodreads. It looks like the app hasn’t had a UI update since Amazon bought it in 2013. In fact, it’s very similar to when it was launched in 2007. Other apps, such as Netflix, Facebook and Google, they have become powerful by using their immense amount of data to develop algorithms that try to anticipate what you want to read or see before doing so. Goodreads only recommends what is widely popular and in a vaguely adjacent genre.
From the store to the referral service to the Kindle hardware, Amazon could do so much better. However, it’s as if Amazon likes the little effort it has to put into its huge monopoly to keep making dollars. Earlier this year, Comixology CEO David Steinberger left to “lead a new initiative across Amazon that is too good an opportunity not to take advantage of.” In a Twitter thread, he assured that he would be with Comixology in an advisory role. From the outside, it looks like Amazon went and rewarded ineptitude with a promotion. I’d be even angrier, but I’m still trying to find the book I wanted to read on my Kindle.