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Scribd Pulls Digital Comics From Its Subscription Reading Service (the-digital-reader.com)
Popular ebooks platform, Scribd has quietly removed digital comics from its subscription reading service. According to a report on The Digital Reader, the feature was added in February 2015, and may have been pulled as part of a cost-cutting measure. From the article: Scribd confirmed the news in a statement: "We launched comics in 2015, and while we were excited to bring new content to our readers, few actively took advantage of them. We will be focusing our efforts on enhancing the experience surrounding our other great content types including books, audiobooks, magazines, and documents. We alerted comic readers of the news via email in early December. We understand that this news is disappointing to comic readers. This was a difficult decision, and we hope that they'll explore the rest of what Scribd has to offer in the coming months." It's interesting that Scribd says that they informed subscribers, because that is not the impression I get from the complaints on Twitter. Many were surprised when they noticed, and based on the timestamps the comics were apparently pulled on or before 1 December.
I don't know scribd but any newspaper without comics is a shame...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
I looked at their offerings a while back and found the attitude of their website offensive.
They will never get any money from me, and I suspect I am not alone in this sentiment.
>> Scribd says that they informed subscribers
"...in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard."
This is the problem with subscription services; the provider can change their mind at a whim as to what they provide, leaving subscribers in the lurch. We saw it with the disappearing e-books a while back. Cell phone providers are changing plans all the time, as are TV providers. The situation will only get worse with Software-As-A-Service providers. What are you going to do when your budget software service goes under, or is acquired by a bigger provider and is shut down? Or when your backup provider stops supporting your OS?
... and this is on top of all the third party data sharing, affiliate advertising, and security bypass "features" that modern services employ.
I heartily recommend avoiding subscription services like the plague.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Amazon has pulled tons of comics from their Kindle Unlimited subscription services as well in the past: http://goodereader.com/blog/e-... Apparently the big 'problem' with comics (compared to novels) is that the average reader can/will read a few of them in an hour, as opposed to be a few days/weeks for a novel, which really skews the payments and projections, making them too expensive to cover costs under the subscription. Plus there's often extra deals with the publishers like no cost if the reader reads less than 10% of the book which is not uncommon with novels, but for the average comic books that's only a couple of pages so pretty much every reader hits the threshold.
Is there a point to this site, other than commandeering .PDFs and placing them inside a tiny JS browser in the center of your screen (and making any sort of download very difficult or impossible to find)?
Would someone care to post some real news? Some idiot sues Apple because a driver was using iFruit, and now this. Slashdot going the way of the Digg.
I had the Yuma Sun coming in dead wood only because of the comics. Their digital subscription doesn't include the Sunday Comics or the mass of inserts you normally see on the Sunday paper and I missed them. I recently dropped the digital version when they began charging an additional fee to get both the printed and the digital version. It seemed odd but economically it was cheaper and fit my needs better to just get the dead wood version. I can only surmise that there was an additional licensing fee for the comics online, and that it was significant enough that the publishers felt they could not pass it on and maintain a low dollar cost point that people would continue to pay.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Until the early 1970s comics were competitive with other forms of entertainment. That is, in cents per hour for a new, on-demand product. But the problem was always distribution. Being aimed at kids, comics brought in the lowest profits. In the early 1970s the mom and pop stores began to phase out comics in favour of more profitable items. Comics ceased to be mass market, so they ceased to compete with other forms of mass market entertainment. They have been in long term decline ever since.
Shocker! Comics stripped of their visual element are inane. These are not conversion to radio plays, which are often rich in description and dialog.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Its not just the PDF scraper you are thinking of. It was a real service. At the price it was nice to burn through a bunch of comics but the selection was limited. I could always find a decent regular book to read as well and considered it a good value at $8 USD / month but when they announced the change around November I cancelled the same day.