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Scott McCloud on Comics and the Internet, part 2
strredwolf writes: "Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics, posted up his latest I Can't Stop Thinking comic essay. In it, he continues on his "Coins of the Realm" series on Micropayments, citing the RIAA in price gouging (records costing $15, but tapes $2 a pop), and using Napster as an example on how to "put it to the man" by charging only 15 cents/song, and sending all the money over to the artists themselves. He also points to Scott Kurtz PvP, and how if every viewer chipped in 25 cents, and accounting for hosting and handling costs, Kurtz would be on a $73,000/year payrole! Interesting arguments. Saw on the PvP site." We linked to the prior essay as well, if you missed it.
So besides starving artists and fans of the starving artists, who really wants this? Obviously Visa etc. don't give a rat's arse about micropayments or we'd have them already. And sadly it will take the backing of major players like Visa to get a system off the ground. (If someone can do an end run around them, so much the better.)
Just this week I was wrestling with this problem. I have a publishing company, and we sell books... but I wanted to try selling a $3 PDF as an experiment. And I wanted to do it withough larding up MY web server with ecommerce software and file hosting. I wanted a place to upload files, and said place would handle the payment/download, and then just send me a check.
I looked all over. There's Digibuy, but they charge a MINIMUM commission of $2... sort of pointless for a $3 download. And they were one of the cheapest.
Eventually I found swreg.org. They have a micropayment pay-for-download service. For products with a price of up to $7, they charge you $0.69 in commission. Best deal I have found. Terrible interface, but the value seems to be there, in case anyone was looking for something like this too. It's not a true micropayment in the "pay 1 cent to view my comic strip" sense, but it fit my needs anyway.