Whenever an app or service is bought by a tech giant, its users are right to fear the worst; And companies like Amazon are not immune to this pessimism, and rightly so.
[El lector de libros electrónicos que deberías comprar, punto: análisis del Amazon Kindle (2022)]
When Amazon bought Comixology, it bought the best comic reading service on the market, with access to thousands of issues from world-renowned publishers, with characters like Batman, Spider-Man or Avengers. It was such a good application that a real community of users formed around it, eager to read the releases of the week.
How Amazon Is Killing Comics Fandom
At first, it seemed that users’ fears were unfounded. In fact, Comixology improved by leaps and bounds thanks to the flow of money from Amazon, becoming the benchmark for comic book fans who had made the leap to digital formats. He went so far as to open his own publishing house, in which he released titles from some of the most recognized names in the industry such as Mark Millar, and even sparked the interest of Netflix to adapt them into series and films. The only change that indicated its Amazon membership was that users could log in with their Amazon account instead of creating one from scratch.
Amazon came to publish its own comics via Comixology
That was lost in 2019, when Comixology underwent the biggest change in its history, a change that, nearly two years later, appears to have dealt a life-threatening wound to the service. That’s when Amazon revealed its true intentions: merge Comixology with your Kindle service. Something that could have been done well, given that the Kindle is already the largest library of books on the planet, but it was done without considering user needs.
The new Comixology was a very limited version of the original, losing most of its features such as the store; instead of having a hub from which to buy all the news for the week, users now had to get lost in the Amazon store, which is not designed to keep up with what’s new. The reader was also not designed to display comics, and basic functionality like zooming was gone (making double-page spreads unreadable). To top it all off, users outside the US were dropped.
Comixology is the new victim of tech layoffs
Fan reaction, naturally, was not good. Digital comic book sales plummeted simply because no one was sure when the new issue of their favorite series was released. When the founder and CEO of Comixology walked out the back door, the future of the service was thrown into question.
Today, that future is darker than ever. Amazon has reported a large number of layoffs at Comixology, with some rumors pointing to a 50% workforce reduction, perhaps 75%, affecting vital positions. Something that will inevitably affect the service, and now the question is who will take over?
The irony of Comixology’s downfall is that it happened just when he had all the ballots to succeed: With a pandemic making it impossible to go to the comic book store and rising paper prices, many users wanted to make the digital leap, but Amazon missed that opportunity.
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