Well, this is a new one– a trailer for the trailer of Iron Man 3, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow, which will be released on Tuesday on the Apple trailers web site.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=askHCPHNRsM[/youtube]
Let the frame-by-frame analysis commence!
Sadly, this teaser of a trailer strategy comes all too close to this news story:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBM3j7x4Lcw[/youtube]
My plan to reduce the stack of read but unreviewed books by reviewing one a day has fallen sadly afoul of events — and the particular “event” in this case was the fact that Thing 2 (my younger son, now 11) and I have been playing a lot of Lego Indiana Jones 2 the last week or so.
(It’s not new, but all of the Lego games – except for Harry Potter, which has over-complicated game mechanics — are so much fun that it’s great just to pick them up and run around smashing things and jumping your little man around randomly; they’re the kind of games that make you happy just to look at on the shelf and even more so to pull them back down and play.)
In other, unrelated news, my iPod Touch has been acting up for the past couple of weeks, and finally succumbed to the Ubiquitous White Screen of Death over the last few days. Even the so-called “genius bar” — I’ve been a user of Apple products for a long time now, and I greatly preferred it when they were scrappy underdogs and not arrogant SOBs — was no help, and so I ended up having to get a new one earlier today.
So far, it doesn’t seem all that different — it supposedly has the super neat-o keen-o “retina display” and a faster processor, but it basically seems like the same device to me. Except. This new one has a camera in it, a cheap crappy phone-style camera, so I can now take cheap crappy pictures of random things when I remember to. And so, this afternoon, instead of actually writing a review for one (or more!) of the books in that big stack, I played some more Lego Indiana Jones 2 with my son, took a picture of the stack of books, and wrote the above.
I’m not proud, mind you.
Uh-oh…
The Justice Department has at last filed an anti-trust complaint in New York against Apple and five publishers over an alleged price fixing conspiracy. The decision to sue comes after weeks of media leaks that suggested the government was trying to pressure the parties into a settlement.
The issue turns on whether five publishers colluded with Apple to implement “agency pricing” in which the publishers set a price and the retailer takes a commission.
<snip>
The heart of the allegations turn on whether Apple acted as the hub of a conspiracy in which the publishers sought to freeze Amazon out of the e-book market unless it changed its pricing structure. Amazon had been using a wholesale model in which it bought books from the publishers and then charged what it liked.
Amazon often sold the e-books below cost in order to build market share and, in doing so, publishers believed it was setting an artificially low floor for prices.
via It’s on — US sues Apple, publishers over e-book prices — paidContent.
The relevant question, of course, is: if agency pricing for e-books is found to be illegal, how long will the same price point hold for digital versions of comic books? Or does it not matter because DC, Marvel, et al are licensing their books to Comixology and Graphicly, which could be construed as a much stronger form of agency?
Needless to say, we’ll be watching this case with great interest.
The Lance Star: Sky Ranger comic book, “One Shot!” by Bobby Nash and James Burns arrives on Apple’s iTunes store for immediate release at
http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/lance-star-sky-ranger-one/id505101665?mt=11
About Lance Star: Sky Ranger “One Shot!”:
November, 1941. Ace Air Adventurer Lance Star accepts a dangerous mission into an enemy stronghold to stop the Nazi’s from uncovering plans for a weapon long believed destroyed. Lance flies a solo mission to Kiev where he is to plant explosives and destroy a weapons facility when he runs into an old enemy. Now, Lance is faced with a choice. Complete the mission? Or take down the Sky Ranger’s greatest adversary?
He’s only going to get one shot at this. Will he choose the mission or revenge?
Featuring high-flying adventure, aerial dog fights, explosive action, and stunning artwork, Lance Star: Sky Ranger “One Shot!” is pure pulp fun from start to finish.
You can find Lance Star: Sky Ranger “One Shot!” at http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/lance-star-sky-ranger-one/id505101665?mt=11
Lance Star: Sky Ranger “One Shot!” is exactly the sort of high-flying, action-packed air war yarn I really enjoy. It’s fine pulpish fun from start to finish. Bobby Nash and James Burns are aces! –James Reasoner
Clean, straight, refreshing. Really good. How do you go wrong with Nazis, dogfights, revenge, secret weapons? Check it out. –Flint Dille
According to Pew Research, one out of every five adult Americans now owns a tablet or an e-book reader. That was before Apple announced its new e-textbook initiative.
Imagine buying all your college textbooks for about a hundred bucks and then carrying them around in a 1.33 pound device. You’ll never need your locker again. Students won’t pop their spines carrying a backpack that is so heavy PeTA wouldn’t let you strap one onto a mule.
And if you’re a comics fan, you’ll never need to schlep around a couple hundred long boxes. Well, not unless you want to.
So people should just stop bitching about electronic comic books. It’s not controversial any more. It doesn’t begat bootlegging; certainly not now that the government is shutting down bootleg sites. Just as soon as publishers start releasing their books at a fair price point – there are no printing costs, no paper costs, no shipping, no returns, and no alternate covers, so $2.99 (let alone $3.99) is a rip-off.
“But I like the feel of the paper,” you might whine. Yes, and I enjoy hearing the crack of the buggy-whip. Deal with it. Stop cutting down trees and milking our ever-dwindling oil supply to print and distribute all those books and magazines you read once – if at all. Publishing is an ecological nightmare; e-publishing doesn’t cure the problem but, like the hybrid and electronic engines, it helps. A lot.
The other by-product is even more interesting: we are breeding a new generation of readers. People are buying e-books and magazines and newspapers and we’re reading them on our iPads and Kindles and such. For a full year now, adult hardcovers and paperbacks, adult mass market books, and children’s/young adult hardcover and paperback have exceeded hard copy sales. In the past year, Borders finally bit the dust, Barnes and Nobles continues to cough up blood, and tablet/e-reader sales skyrocketed.
Tell me where our future lies.
If sales slow down considerably – forgetting how Apple’s sold zillions of iPads to schools and to businesses, forgetting how the iPad 3 is coming within the next 10 weeks, forgetting textbook sales – then it’ll take as long as, oh, maybe three years before over half of the population of American families have one.
Yes, you don’t have to use the device for reading. You can do a lot of other things with your tablet: play games, surf the Internet, write stuff, listen to music, watch teevee, even make phone calls via Skype. All I need is a comfy chair, a toilet, a shower stall, a refrigerator, a microwave and a great pair of headphones and I’m set for life.
Comics store owners – the smart ones – are beginning to adjust. They’re filling in the vacuum created by Borders’ vaporization by expanding their trade paperback and hardcover racks. They’re getting involved in more comics-related tchotchkes, more heroic fantasy movie stuff, and more innovative and distinctive product in general. They no longer have to endure as much terror as they go through the monthly Diamond catalog to guess which non-returnable pamphlets are going to put them out of business.
So, again I ask you – as comics readers, as book readers.
Where does our future lie?
THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil
LOST Veterans Elizabeth Sarnoff and Jack Bender join us to talk about their role in the new Fox series, ALCATRAZ, plus more with Jorge Garcia and Sarah Jones. DC drops the axe on 6 New 52 titles and Mark Millar creatures a universe.
The new Fox Series, ALCATRAZ, might seem a little familiar to LOSTies – there’s JJ Abrams, an island and even Hurley but there’s a lot more hidden in the mystery than you might think. Jorge Garcia and Sarah Jones join us to talk about what you can be sure will be different this time. Plus DC breaks the line and goes to $3.99 on Bat-Books.
The Point Radio is on the air right now – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or mobile device– and please check us out on Facebook right here & toss us a “like” or follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.
If you you’re inclined to keep an eye out, heroes pop up like Kleenex. Steve Niles just made the cut.
At the 2010 Baltimore Comic-Con Harvey Awards dinner, Mark Waid offered a courageous keynote address which offered a simple message: digital comics are here to stay, there is an international bootlegging community and we as creators and industry doyens must learn to deal with it. For this, Mark was roundly booed, hassled and harassed by his peers. Astonishingly, one of his tormentors was the otherwise quite gentlemanly Sergio Aragonés.
I don’t recall if Steve Niles was at the dinner, but if not, it’s likely he heard about it. Suggesting that any acknowledgement of those who pirate comics is akin to taking a dump on the bible. This is true throughout the media: records (yeah, it’s okay to call them “records;” look it up), movies and teevee shows, even books. And you thought nobody was reading.
The media industry’s response to this has been to advocate passage of the Stop Online Piracy Act, a.k.a. SOPA. Simply put, SOPA allows any intellectual property (IP) owner to legally compel any Internet Service Provider (a.k.a. ISP; we’re shooting for the entire alphabet this week) to kick off any website suspected of copyright infringement.
Well, here’s a clue for you. Well over 99% of the websites on the Internet infringe copyrights and trademarks. Pick-ups of news items, graphics used to illustrate anything, sound bytes and even some You Tube links – they are all infringing upon somebody’s IP. You rip off the Superman logo font because you’re artistic and just being cute? Well, that logo is a registered trademark, and you are now Lex Luthor.
So Steve, bless his 30 Days of Night heart, took a stand. “SOPA does more than go after so-called ‘piracy’ websites,” said he. “SOPA takes away all due process, shuts down any site it deems to be against the law without trial, without notification, without due process… Nobody seems to give a shit, or either they’re scared. Either way, very disappointing. I guess when it affects them they’ll get mad… I know folks are scared to speak out because a lot of us work for these companies, but we have to fight. Too much is at stake.”
He tweeted all these comments; I got them from our pals at Digital Spy, except they asterisked “shit.” We here at ComicMix are beneath that.
Here’s some facts. Every time somebody unlawfully downloads IP – and note I said “unlawfully” because it is unlawful – the media racket sees that as a lost sale. This is overwhelming bullshit. People sample, people are curious, people’s friends make a recommendation and said people check ‘em out. There’s plenty of stuff that you’d check out before laying down your plastic sight unseen. The actual number of downloads that defraud the owner (which is usually not the creator) is a fraction of the total. These downloads are still illegal, but IP moguls should pull the stick out of their ass and tell the truth when they are babbling about how much bootlegging is costing them. They are liars.
There are a great many services that allow you to legally purchase IP, and the largest of these is Apple’s iTunes, which offers music, television, movies, books, magazines, newspapers, software (a.k.a. “apps”) and probably jpg’s of papyrus scrolls. As of around October 2011 – the date varies by category – iTunes has sold over 16 billion songs, about one half-billion movies, videos and teevee shows, some 20 billion apps, and Crom knows how many books, magazines and newspapers.
Here’s the rub: in each and every one of these approximately 40,000,000,000 cases, the purchaser could have downloaded the damn thing for free. In most cases, it is far easier to illegally cop a boot than it is to purchase one. Let’s start with the fact that you don’t need to have a credit card or room left on your credit limit to procure your illegal bootie.
So. 40 billion downloads from just one – the biggest one – online merchant in a world that only houses seven billion people. That’s an average of four and one-half perfectly legal downloads for each and every person, including babies in the Amazon who don’t even have access to Amazon.
Hey! People are inherently good. Go know!
Of course SOPA is being supported by all the big IP companies, including Disney (Marvel) and Time Warner (DC). If only they were so moral about how they treat their creative talent, without whom both companies would constitute another real estate bust.
On the other side: Facebook, Google, Twitter and Wikipedia, the latter of which threatens to disappear should SOPA pass. Then students will actually have to do research, and we can’t have that.
Also standing proudly on the other side: Steve Niles. Good for you, pal.
Good grief. Now Mark Evanier is going to hate me.
Thursday: Dennis O’Neil
After laying in wait for six years, FEAR FACTOR has blasted back on network TV to big ratings. Host Joe Rogan talk about returning from the Television Graveyard and how the show has changed. Plus Comic Book Pioneer Joe Simon passes and Netflix gives Apple a gift.
The Point Radio is on the air right now – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or mobile device– and please check us out on Facebook right here & toss us a “like” or follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.
And the other shoe drops…
Marvel is taking its entire line of comics “day-and-date” digitally, meaning you’ll be able to download all of the company’s comics on the its mobile app just as soon as they’re available in physical stores. That polishes off one of the few downsides to digital comics: Having to wait for the latest and greatest.
The line-wide rollout will be finished by the end of March, 2012, and unlike DC’s 52-title relaunch, day-and-date will be coming to individual titles on a staggered basis, mostly to coincide with new story arcs. The move covers all of Marvel’s comics except third-party licensed works—like the Stephen King The Stand books—and its sex-and-violence-riddled MAX imprint.
via Gizmodo.
Well, it certainly hasn’t hurt DC any. And considering that Apple is still heavily invested in Disney/Marvel, it was inevitably going to happen, it was just a question of timing.
But again, I have to repeat: we still don’t know what digital sales figures for comics are like. And until we know that, we can’t tell if it’s working, if it’s helping or hurting comics stores, and so on. Data, people… we need data.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
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