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.

Comments

Re:Comics are not economically viable. Period.

[Opportunist]

The problem here being that comics are still thought of as being targeted at kids. In came Japan with its Mangas and blew that idea out of the water. And we were sitting there and staring wide eyed as they took over the more profitable market segment of the adolescent and young adult market, a demographic that was able and very willing to spend WAY more money on it than any "serious" adult would spend on "serious" newspapers or magazines, including a long tail of add-on products like figurines. And we're not talking about cheap 5 dollar plastic action figures that only become valuable collector's items after staying in their original box for 50 years, these are essentially the same plastic junk figurines selling for 50+ bucks.

Still we don't learn and keep considering "comics" to be material for children. That's at least the only reason I could imagine why you can still find quite brutal anime series mixed into the Saturday morning cartoon lineup.