Over the weekend, news broke that the popular LiveJournal community Scans–Daily has been closed down. The community started out as a repository for slash fiction, but has developed into a wide-ranging sampler of all kind of copyrighted comics material — some of it long unavailable, some fresh and new. Although moderators worked to prevent posting complete stories there, those opposed to “pirate posting” sites had a lot to dislike about Scans-Daily.

Brigid Alverson has the most thorough and level-headed round-up of links and so on, including the new home of the site. (Nothing goes away for too long on the Internet.) But there is much more. Writer Peter David had recently found out about the site and was suspected of having “ratted them out”; however, in a message thread that’s up to 500 posts and counting at his blog, he explained he was not responsible. (LJ had shut down the site after Photobucket reported TOS violations.)

We’re not going to get too much into all of this — we posted a few links to S_D here, always to things that were otherwise unavailable, and got shit for it. If you want to wade into the 500+ post thread, go right ahead. The most extreme ends of either side are “stealing is always bad” vs “free sampling is always good” with every shade of gray in-between. Kevin Melrose has more thoughts — as does just about everyone on the internet — while Lisa Fortuner examines the facet that Scans-Daily grew out of female fan interests and what that had to do with its end:

That said, I do think that if Scans_Daily were a male dominated community it would have not been suspended like this. Why? Because I don’t think it would have been on a site like Livejournal. In my experience, that’s where the male-female distinction seems to be. Female fans populate social network sites run by panicky male-dominated corporations who want to make money from selling advertising to women, but don’t really have the brass ovaries to deal with hosting female interaction on the internet. It’s like they expect feathered sugar with a hint of spice and are shocked to discover girls have locker room talk and smoke in the bathroom. Male fan communities seem to be owned and operated by like-minded males, the male-dominated comic company itself, the comic creator who gathers his own fans to his side, or the self-style Pirate King who set up the torrent site specifically for illegal activities and searched around for an ISP that wouldn’t check on him too closely.

Tom Spurgeon makes what seems to be a sensible point:

Creators should have the right to control their works even if the person who wants to usurp that right means no real harm, thinks they know better, actually knows better, supported that creator in the past, or whatever. If you want to support a creator, embrace with seriousness the actions they’ve taken or declined to take when it comes to on-line iterations of their work.

In other words, “Free sampling is for your own good!” isn’t a particularly grown-up response, although it is certainly one that is common in the Internet Era.

More soon, in all probability.

Via Flog, gladsome news that FBI is offering PDF previews of several upcoming books

Download links are available on the product listing pages for the books listed and linked below. Try before you buy with these nice juicy chunks:

• Hank Ketcham’s Complete Dennis the Menace 1959-1960 - read all the strips from January 1959!
• Unlovable Vol. 1 - preview the first 20 pages!
• Humbug - see what the Humbug hullabaloo is all about by reading the entire first issue!
• Mome Vol. 14: Spring 2009 - sample 15 pages, including almost every artist in the issue!
• Sam’s Strip - read the first full month of strips!
• The Wolverton Bible - read the first 12 pages, comprising most of Genesis 1-6!

While Robert Crumb’s GENESIS is due later this year and is certain to set the comics world on its ear, you won’t find much more spectacular than Basil Wolverton’s version of the same material, above.

For those of you who missed it, we got a chance to interview uclick’s Douglas Edwards and Jeff Webber about their program to sell comics on iPhones for $0.99 an issue.

uclick has long been making comics content available for various mobile platforms, and Edwards is no stranger to interactive media, having arrived at uclick in May from Handmark, where he launched games and information apps, including the very successful Pocket Express. Although he didn’t deal with comics at Handmark, the business is a natural for uclick, given their large library of comics and connections to Universal Press Syndicate and Andrews McMeel Universal, he says.

Although he won’t give exact figures, Edwards notes that they are moving “thousands of units every couple of weeks on the best units.” Given that the project is only a few weeks old, momentum is still building. However, he observes “I’ve been at the launch of many products, and this is extremely promising. I wish that everything had started this well.” Bone has been the biggest success, but Papercuts’ Nancy Drew has also started out well, indicating that there may be a larger audience than thought for material aimed at a younger market.

A couple of thoughts that we couldn’t squeeze into the article: many people keep wishing that comics cost only 99 cents. Well, digitally, they do.

Also, as our questions indicated, it’s our suspicion that not all comics will be created equally for the iPhone, by whatever means they get there. And someone is going to invent the perfect comic for the perfect format and make a zillion bucks. Bet on it.

Related news items:

• Comixology has a well-reviewed new app for iPhone. We’ve been fiddling with it ourselves for a bit, and it’s prety useful, with columns pull lists and previews.

• uclick isn’t the only company putting up comics content on the iStore: iVerse is also in the mix, and just announced a deal with IDW to put up Star Trek comics.

You can now download the first issue of BONE for your iPhone via uClick. Just 99¢. Now we have both the first issue of WATCHMEN (via motion comics) and BONE on our phones.

BTW, we’ve always loved that first panel of BONE #1 — such an iconic beginning.

Technorati Tags: Jeff Smith

Ya gotta say one thing for DJ Coffman…he’s persistent. The former Platinum Studios cheerleader has turned into an implacable foe, reporting on every up and down of the company. Now, it seems, the recently acquireed Wowio is still late on payments to creators:

The money troubles and bad PR continued as their recently “acquired” Wowio.com are way late on paying the creators and authors from there. (56 days as of this post I guess) There are many authors talking to one another and I’m kept in the loop. I see some have contacted lawyers now, which Wowio is aware of because it was reported that the legal eagles who represent Wowio were contacted. So yeah, that’s turning into a major headache for people… it’s a shame. It’s not really effecting me, but I do know some creators who had their earnings in upcoming budgets for things and they’re left hanging with no communication or clarification.

MEANWHILE, Todd Allen has a much longer look at Wowio’s original business plan:

The first objection from the publishers is to the non-guaranteed availability of these free/sponsored ebook downloads. Chris Crosby is widely quoted as calling the availability of those downloads “a crapshoot.” Yes, telling people to go to Wowio and get a free download, but not knowing if it will be really be free is a questionable business practice. Unfortunately, I haven’t heard any comments on what percentage of the time sponsored downloads are available. I did go to the Wowio site and downloaded the first issue of The Trouble with Girls, which was kindly sponsored by EA Sports and Madden NFL ‘09. This is where that trust issue comes into play. There are a lot of vocal publishers that don’t trust Platinum to maintain sponsorships 24/7. Alas, until you’ve watched it for a few months and tracked availability, making a judgment on sponsorships is problematic. If they have sponsorships up 95%, this might not be such a big deal. If 50% is closer to reality, you might have second thoughts about promoting your work there.

A letter from Ambrosia publisher Wesley Craig Green, stating that he is canceling all contracts with his creators, is going around creative circles. Ambrosia Publishing has been around since 2007 and has published primarily webcomics, although POD versions of their material were available at the web store as well. Titles include such things as CLOCKWORK CREATURE by Kyle Strahm, and Green’s own BEFORE DAWN.

According to the letter, Green’s personal difficulties were taking too much attention away from running a publishing company, and all contracts with Ambrosia are now null and void, with creators free to shop their projects at any other publisher.

Right now! Buy the amazing hardcover collection next.

Just to show that several downlodable comics services are still going strong, we got this press release just the other day:

Clickwheel LTD is proud to announce a new addition to its premium roster in ELEPHANTMEN. Written by industry mainstay, Richard Starkings with art by Moritat and Ladronn and published in print by Image comics, ELEPHANTMEN tells the story of the ‘Unhumans,’ The result of genetic engineering, the Unhumans have since served their wartime purpose and must now find new ways to survive in society. True to it’s Sci-Fi themes, ELEPHANTMEN and Starkings are eager to help Clickwheel push the boundaries of comics as we know them:

“I’ve been interested in CLICKWHEEL since Tim set up the site,” says ELEPHANTMEN and HIP FLASK writer/creator Richard Starkings. “Of all the sites that approached COMICRAFT with the whole ‘iTunes for comics deal’, it seemed clear that CLICKWHEEL had the cleanest, best designed user interface, and as ‘Purveyors of Unique Design and Fine Lettering’ the presentation of a download site is obviously going to be important to us. Plus — Tim didn’t even approach me, he got my attention just by doing a good job, what a concept! When Tim added 2000AD to CLICKWHEEL I realized that we were more than a perfect match — I’ve often said in interviews that ELEPHANTMEN is the strip I would have contributed to 2000AD had I ever had the opportunity. 2000AD’s founding fathers, John Wagner and Pat Mills were a huge influence on me and we even share cover artist Boo Cook from time to time!”

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ComicList is reporting that Q2 payments are late, and our email inbox is filling up with reports from publishers who have not been paid.

Oh well.

UPDATE: We just received this from T Campbell and are running it as received:

My name is T Campbell, and I’ve been doing comics, in partnership with various artists, for nearly a decade. My most popular work is the teen comedy Penny & Aggie, with Gisele Lagace.

I learned about Wowio from Mike S. Miller, who had published Penny & Aggie in color in the direct market in 2005. His decision to do so made me wary of his overall business acumen– even Archie can barely survive in the direct market– but he had always been good to Giz and me, and we heard reports of others earning significant amounts. And in the end, being involved with them carried few opportunity costs… we weren’t making money off e-books any other way. So we cautiously became involved with the company. I was surprised and pleased to find myself making thousands of dollars each quarter, and being paid on schedule! As a result, I increased my output, to take advantage of Wowio’s system in the years to come. Finally, I could write as many comics as I wanted to with an eye toward profit on them!

There was only one big warning sign that Wowio would be, in the end, another small publishing company whose reach exceeded its grasp. Though the company’s first two sponsors, Verizon and Electronic Arts, were impressive enough names to quell my fears, other names didn’t seem to be following. I began to hear rumors that Wowio was burning through investment capital in order to pay publishers. We changed our plans to assume that Wowio would only pay out for up to Q3, 2008.

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We’ve had our Tricorder, a.k.a. iPhone, for a couple of weeks now, and despite its hefty price tag and hefty data plan, we can’t imagine going back to a world where we don’t sleep with it beneath our pillow every night. There’s a growing sense that the iPhone will be the killer platform for downloading and reading comics in a portable, esthetically pleasing form. Cartoonist Sherm Cohen has even started a new blog devoted to reading comics on iPhones. His earliest experiments were somewhat inconclusive, but that is sure to change:

Good idea, but when I viewed the comic pages on the iPhone, I found them to have been magically degraded in resolution…so much that images were too blurry to comfortably read. What gives? Turns out that the iPhone automatically “optimizes” (=ruins) the images when you import them. No workaround for this yet.

PDF files don’t get degraded when you import them into your iPhone, but the iPhone needs a native PDF reader even more than it needs a comic book reader application. The only way to get a PDF file into your iPhone right now is to email it to yourself and read it as an attachment. I don’t want to wait for a 35Mb download over the iPhone’s bandwidth. Not a viable solution IMHO.

BTW, at the Comic Book Visionaries panel at San Diego, Grant Morrison stated that you can’t take computers into the bath[room]. Duty compels us to tell you that FMB also got an iPhone, and has already proven that is just not true.

A big story we haven’t had time to cover is Wowio’s evolution under its new ownership (Platinum). So far, the reaction has been…well, less than they might have hoped for, with complaints about a cluttered interface, comics previously free not free any more, and many publishers pulling out due to the updated contract. This post by Johanna will bring you quickly up to speed. Leading the list of naysayers is the apostate D.J. Coffman, who found the new deal for creators less than he might have hoped for:

This was what set off alarm bells in my head initially. So, they’ll be using your content to generate pageviews that you have no way of accessing, nor do you know how much advertisers are paying, so you have to just trust whatever they say you made off of pageviews without any system of checks and balances mentioned. In light of Platinum Studios telling me that Hero By Night only generated 800 bucks in ad revenue for a webcomic that has been online since October 2006 and consistantly had the HIGHEST pageviews on all of Drunk Duck… I don’t have faith that they can either A. figure out real well paying advertisers, or B. tell the truth about how much they actually made off of web advertising revenue.

Sean Kleefield was also disheartened.

The free books that were being subsidized by advertising? Not quite so free any more. You still have the option to read it for free online, but this calls up a Wowio-specific in-browser reader that, while it behaves somewhat like Adobe Acrobat, prevents users from looking at the comics without being logged in. If you want a copy of the comic in question saved to your hard drive — where you might transfer it from one device to another, or try printing a copy — it will cost you. Issues that I’d already downloaded for free and have sitting on my computer now cost as much as $3.95 an issue. Public domain material, like Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein and Joe Kubert’s Out of This World Adventures, now run $.99 a piece. (These books and many others, I might add, are not only freely available here, but I believe is where Wowio is getting their copies from!) A number of other books I’ve seen are priced at $1.50, and I’ve seen a few at $3.95, not all of which are longer graphic novels. Obviously, this leads to some questions about pricing.

Perhaps most interesting is the take of David Rothman, whose Teleread blog covers ebooks in general — as a reminder, Wowio doesn’t just offer comics, they offer prose books from a variety of publishers as well, so this story covers a lot of territory. The title of Rothman’s post on the subject: Ad-cluttered Wowio e-book site: The uglier side of globalization—minus those classy free PDF downloads :

By contrast, Platinum’s advertising is so intrusive that I almost wonder if it’s part of a conspiracy to discredit ad-supported books.

Meanwhile here are a few of the companies you might want to complain to: Bomgar software (especially!), Vonnage, Hewlett Packard, Volkswagen, and Google, the latter of which should be ashamed of itself for cooperating with Platinum. Tell ‘em you want ads in Wowio books to keep ‘em free, but not quite so often. Is an ad almost always in sight when you watch television?

I would heartily suggest that the advertising community shun Wowio unless it promises more humane treatment of visitors in the future. As it happens there don’t seem to that many advertisers, or at least as viewed by me. It’s just that I keep seeing some of the same ones again and again. Sad. Is it partly because smart companies are already avoiding the reborn Wowio—preferring to see their products presented in a less cluttered environment?

In addition, Johanna indicates that there is a new D.J. Coffman, a fellow named Gerry who has been going around to blogs commenting on the new Wowio and defending the site. This wuld presumably be designer Gerry Manacsa.

Back blogging at Newsarama, Paul Levitz runs down DC’s digital strategy, “Motion Comics” — which takes comics art and animates it. First up: WATCHMEN.

Last summer, I traveled to London with Warner Premiere President Diane Nelson to show Dave Gibbons a first test of a new digital format. Diane’s team and WATCHMEN director Zack Snyder passionately wanted to take the original WATCHMEN graphic novel, put the artwork into motion, add a soundtrack, and create a new, multi-format digital version while keeping all of the original literary and art material. We spent hours with Dave, discussing the inherent challenges, the proven power of WATCHMEN to convert people to the “new” format of graphic novels, and how that might happen again if we did this new project well. Unsurprisingly, Dave had important insights into how the artwork could be digitally manipulated to best effect, and ended up becoming a vital part of the process, working directly with Zack and the producers over the last year. This first chapter of the first “Motion Comic” went live as a free download from iTunes on the ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY site last night, and production is moving steadily towards releasing the rest of the monumental work that is WATCHMEN in multiple formats for computers and cell phones between now and the movie’s premiere.

The Wowio/Platinum news is coming thick and fast, as founder William Lidwell has sent the following email to all Wowio publishers:

I am pleased to finally and officially announce that WOWIO has been acquired by Platinum Studios, Inc. The process took longer than any of us desired (you can make lawyers work hard, but not fast), but it is done and we are all excited to get back to the business of books.

Per Kristin Ellison’s previous email to you, an amendment to the existing Publisher’s Agreement will be required to assign your agreement over and enable full use of the new capabilities. It is short and simple, and provides you with a number of new options for monetizing and distributing your content.

Kristin will be contacting publishers of books. Mike Miller will be contacting publishers of comics. You should receive an email from them before Wednesday of next week with the amendment. If you do not, please contact us and let us know. Our goal is to launch the site as quickly as possible — as early as 7/23, and no later than 8/4. The faster we get your amendments back, the faster we can launch.

Lastly, with mergers and acquisitions, there are invariably personnel changes. To this end, I am sad to report that Mike Miller will be moving on from WOWIO to pursue a new digital venture — he has kindly agreed to stay on long enough to help with the amendments. Mike has been with us from the beginning and has done a tremendous job developing the comic book side of the business. I am grateful for his hard work and dedication to the WOWIO mission, and on behalf of the WOWIO team I want to publicly recognize and thank him for his efforts.

Thank you for your support and patience during this process. We will be in touch soon.

Hm, curiouser and curiouser. Platinum Studios Announces It Is in Negotiations to Acquire WOWIO, LLC. Notice this is not an announcement that Platinum is BUYING Wowio, just an announcement that they are talking about doing it. Given the state of Platinum’s cash flow these days (as shown by the SEC filings) their acquiring any business is surprising. PR in the link, but this is our favorite line:

Final deal terms between the parties have not been reached but the companies hope a transaction can be concluded early in the third quarter this year.

WOWIO, the ebook distribution site, has gone offline and word is going around that the company has been sold. Wowio offered FREE digital distribution of various comics publishers including Lone Star Press, Steve Rude, Digital Webbing and many others. We’d been hearing rumbles that the company was behind slow on its payments to creators, and as of yesterday the site was offline for 2-4 weeks while the acquisition was complete.

Developing.

That’s the title of a feature from Wired.com which gleefully states:

I’m a huge fan of free things, especially free entertainment — really, who isn’t? Daily Bits has combed through the web, turning up a treasure trove of 17 graphic novels, all available for download.

We’re sure every comic book retailer reading these words is going kerplotz right about now — that is after the tempest that erupted after Boom Studios announced they were giving away the entire first issue of their new book NORTH WIND on MySpace.

Now first issue sampling online is pretty much accepted fare these days; even DC does it. So why the hue and cry that erupted on the private CBIA retailer’s forum, with store owners vowing to stop buying Boom books and all support of the company? Well, a couple of things. The online freebie was available at the exact same time as the first issue went on sale, and Boom had neglected to warn retailers about it.
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Our recap of the Z-Cult affair for PWCW yesterday had this quote from Todd Allen:

“There is a very real possibility that torrents, effectively advertising in this case, have been a factor in sales spikes. People will want a physical copy of an inherent physical product. Crossgen did the research on this 5 years ago and went under before they had a chance to properly implement that research.”

CrossGen! There’s a blast from the past. Their “all freelancers will work in the same office” set-up drew constant Jonestown jokes, but they were ahead of the curve on a lot of things, like the downloadable comics model initiative to post their comics to the web, which they called, amazingly, “Comics on the Web”. In fact someone sent us this link at an article from 2002 on how their implementation of comics downloads had an immediate impact on sales:

Less than 30 days after the launch of CrossGen’s Comics on the Web, retail sales of CrossGen’s comics and trade paperbacks are taking an upward turn, with much of it taking place the week after the launch of Comics on the Web, according to recent sales statistics.

According to figures from Diamond Comic Distributors, first week advance reorders for The Path taken the week after the entire issue was posted for free on CrossGen’s Comics on the Web increased by 54 percent over the level taken for CrossGen’s Sojourn Prequel, which was not posted online prior to its release. In addition, the second week reorders, which typically drop by 50 percent after the comic’s release, actually increased by 23 percent for The Path Prequel. Also, advance reorders for The Path #1, still two weeks from being released, rose by 45 percent in the first week after The Path Prequel’s release, and then another 45 percent on top of that the following week, further bucking the trends for low advance reorders before a book is released.

While this still wasn’t enough to save the company’s ambitious, expensive and fondly remembered by some line of comics, it’s still as close as anyone has come to documenting the effect of making issues available for free download online sampling.

As long as we’re talking about Crossgen, we’ll remind everyone that Checker Books is reprinting a lot of their graphic novels, under a license from Disney.

As the Z-Cult story continues to evolve, many are pointing to the recent ups and downs of the music industry as a reference for where comics stand in the new digital landscape. This Wired interview with Universal Music head Doug Morris has been widely quoted this week, and it even contains a L’il Abner reference:

“There was a cartoon character years ago called the Shmoo,” he says in a raspy tenor. “It was in Li’l Abner. The Shmoo was a nice animal, a nice fella, but if you were hungry, you cut off a piece of him and put onions on it, and if you wanted to play football you just made him like a football. You could do anything to him. That’s what was happening to the music business. Everyone was treating the music business like it was a Shmoo.

Well, we don’t quite get that, but we do get this:
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ComicMix’s Glenn Hauman posts his memories meetings with MARVEl people SIX YEARS AGO:

–which leads into yet another story of how I was brought in to discuss digital strategies with comic companies. This time I was brought in to meet with Gui Karyo, at the time the CIO of Marvel, in March of 2001 to discuss the status of their archives, digital and otherwise; their upcoming CD-ROM archives, and digital asset management in general for the company. I pointed out that Marvel’s in house archives were a disaster, certainly in comparison to DC’s– Marvel didn’t even have complete printed runs of the comics they published, with gaps as recent as the previous decade. Their film for publication had been stored in a warehouse in Arizona, and hot climates are always where I want to store four decade old film.

One of the things I had suggested was taking the time to build a system for digital asset management, so that the company would know what they had and everyone in the company, plus freelancers and licensees, could access it easily. As a demonstration, I pulled out a thousand dollar comic book– Man Of War Comics #1– and said that I could make a decent argument in either direction on whether Marvel owned the rights or not.

For a variety of reasons, Marvel still hasn’t done it, and as a result their own freelancers are now shelling out money to get reference that the company should be providing.

I

Who would have thought one of the biggest stories of the year would have broken over the Thanksgiving weekend? For those of you who have been living in a cave–or possibly on vacation for a week–both Marvel and DC have threatened comic book site Z-Cult with legal action regarding their plentiful torrents of comics. The site has agreed to remove ALL Marvel comics trackers, and to delay posting new DC comics trackers for 30 days. Newsarama has several news stories, and a zillion comments at their message boards. It appears that Top Cow, which has its own downloadable comics program in place, has joined Marvel and DC is asking for the trackers to be taken down.

We’re especially sad about all this because we’ve been getting rid of tons of books we had around the house for reference, thinking “Well, if we REALLY need it, we can just go to Z-cult”…and now THIS happens. Sheesh.

This post is just a place marker really as we attempt to catch up on this story, but Glenn Haumann over at ComicMix adds color with his account of a meeting with DC to deal with illegally pirating…2 1/2 years ago.. The post has a bunch of informative comments from ex-DC staffers, as well.

A few musical notes. One of our correspondents is sad we didn’t note the release of the new Radiohead album last week, but we only now had a chance to download it (paying £5 which seemed only fair) but we need a few more listens before it becomes a part of us. We were also enthused about Moog Acid, the mashup of Luke Vibert and Jean Jacques Perrey, the French electro pioneer. That is primo noodling, bleeps and blips, especially the track that sounds like Delius.

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SLG adds another comic to it’s downloadable EYEMELT site, Thomas Behe and Phil Elliott’s CONTRABAND. Each issue is downloadable for 89¢ — a print collection of all four issues will eventually be made available.

Some months ago, cartoonist Phil Elliott was approached on the street by a teenage girl asking for money. It’s a sad but common enough occurrence in cities, but when Elliott refused, the situation became something much different from anything he’d experienced. “A younger kid — he must have only been about ten — started swearing at me, ‘Give us some ******* money!’” he recalled. “I was then aware that there was another girl filming all this on her mobile phone. What was going on here? Were they trying to provoke me? What happened to the video?”

The incident took on a greater significance for Elliott when writer Thomas Behe contacted him to see if he were interested in drawing a comic he’d written, which explores a voyeuristic underground where profit-hungry youths prowl the streets secretly filming violence and catastrophes with mobile devices. That comic became Contraband, the new digital comic from SLG Publishing, distributed on their online comics site Eyemelt.com. The four-issue series will begin its serialization in October 2007, and a print collection of Contraband will be published in February 2008. A preview is available at SLG’s website, www.slgcomic.com.

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A couple of notes on downloadable content. ICv2 had an interesting chat with Viz’s Senior Vice President of Strategy and Business Development, Dan Marks, who talks about Viz present and possible future forays into downloading manga and anime. Part 1
Part 2
Marks points out the big differences between Japan and the US, in large part a technological one since they are years ahead of us on the whole cel phone thing:

One, it’s a mature market. On the magazine side manga sales have been decreasing for probably eight to 10 years. The way the cell phone is used in Japan would boggle the mind of most Americans. That has cut into manga sales for years. I don’t know if it’s illegal downloads and the availability of the content digitally, actually that may help in the long run. In the United States, manga sales have been growing for the past years and are projected to continue to grow because it’s not a mature market — we’ve barely broken into the market. As far as the effect of downloads in Japan, yeah, it may have hurt, but the market had already hits its peak. In the U.S. there’s so much room to grow, hopefully it doesn’t affect the U.S. market that much.

§ Although it has nothing to do with comics, we found this link (sent by Abel Padilla) interesting as well: It seems romance titan Harlequin is making all of its books downloadable — a fairly groundbreaking move for a traditional publisher. Although it’s not comics, Harlequin’s serial genre novels are consumed (albeit by a different audience) in ways very similar to superhero and manga fans.

“It’s every single line, every single title, so it’s over 120 titles a month,” Malle Vallik, Harlequin’s director of digital content, told Quill & Quire magazine, an industry publication. Harlequin will become the first Canadian publisher to do such a thing, Vallik said. The company thought the move was necessary to be relevant to younger readers who can download to laptops or cellphones, she added.

Vallik also feels that the digital format will allow some confidentiality — gone will be tell-tale piles of romance novels on bedside tables.

Harlequin sold more than 130 million books in 2006.

Via PR, news of a new legit venture to allow fans to create their own scanlations:

Manganovel Corporation and Toshiba Corporation today announced that they will bring the universe of Japanese manga to the global market with the launch of “Manganovel,” an on-line service that allows readers not only to download and read manga in Japanese but to post and offer for sale their own translations of content. The service started beta testing in June this year, and is now officially ready to take manga characters to anime lovers around the world. The site can be accessed at: URL: https://www.manganovel.com .

“Manganovel” will serve as a distribution source for Japanese publishers, and go beyond that to create a community of readers. In a world-first for the comics industry, members will not only be able to download and read Japanese versions of manga, but, by making full use of the potential offered by Web 2.0, be free to upload and even sell their own translations of the comics. Potential readers can get advice on the quality of any individual translation offered on “Manganovel” by reading the comments of other readers on the site’s discussion boards. The whole operation will offer secure digital rights management with “MQbic” (Multi-cubic), digital copyright protection technology developed by Toshiba.

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uClick has signed up BONE for its GoComics reader:

Fone Bone, Smiley Bone and Phoney Bone are coming to mobile phones! uclick has announced an agreement that brings Jeff Smith’s wildly popular Bone series to mobile phones through the GoComics Mobile Comic Book Reader.

The first mobile installment of the critically acclaimed series launched on July 26. New chapters are released weekly.

“I’m always excited about trying new things,” said Bone creator Jeff Smith, “and GoComics lets you have the Bone adventures at your fingertips. Besides, it just makes sense to have Fone on your phone!”

One of the greatest success stories of independent publishing, Bone began in 1991 as a self-published, black-and-white comic book found only on the shelves of specialty stores. The story quickly caught on with fans, becoming an instant cult hit and soon exploding into a national phenomenon.

Today, the multiple Eisner-, Harvey- and National Cartoonist Society-award-winning epic is collected in a black-and-white, 1300-page single volume edition as well as newly colorized graphic novels from Scholastic, available everywhere from comic book shops to bookstores and even public libraries.

While Smith has a long and storied history as a publishing maverick, uclick Manager of Product Development Harold Sipe asserts that the debut of Bone on GoComics will be groundbreaking, representing an unprecedented endorsement for comic books on mobile phones.

“Bone is a stunning work that belongs within the pantheon of great comic book literature,” said Sipe. “Its whimsical characters, perfect blend of humor, adventure and fantasy, and of course, dazzling full-color artwork absolutely shine on mobile phones. Fans are going to love the way this story unfolds on their screens.”

GoComics offers a wide variety of exciting comic books optimized for mobile phone screens. Their star- studded lineup includes Virgin Comics, the sci-fi fantasy hits GØDLAND and Elephantmen, the webcomic-turned-comic-book PvP, the manga and anime horror import Guilstein, high-flying martial arts fun starring the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and many more. The Mobile Comic Book Reader is available on all major carriers, including Cingular, Verizon and Sprint.

For more information on uclick’s GoComics mobile line, visit www.gocomics.com/comicbooks.