Originally published at: Amazon is finally killing Comixology for good | Boing Boing
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The enshitification continues apace!
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Not just killing the app, likely killing many comics that rely on it, the same way killing off their magazine app and forcing them all into Kindle Unlimited has led to that market crashing hard and multiple magazines shuttering.
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I don’t have a lot of comics on my pad, but for most of the old ones I took a screen capture of each page and used InDesign to make pdf versions for myself. Labor intensive, but it works, at least for now.
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You had me worried there for a minute. I don’t think I have 3,000 comics on my account but I did make quite an investment myself. I merged my Comixology account with Amazon quite a while ago after a heads up. I’ve been fine with just using the Kindle app since. I’ve had a few issues with some of the customizable formatting, super annoying when you can’t rotate a phone (anyone actually using a Kindle to read comics? I haven’t upgraded beyond a Paperwhite, myself. 0_o) to make the panel fit the screen for easier reading, and occasionally annoying that the Kindle app seems perpetually buggy despite the constant updates. Saving comics when the KF8 format isn’t publicly documented and I’m not aware of any independent implementations (I might also be guilty of not having tried to strip the DRM for a while now, hope that still works), well, I just gave up on that one. But mostly I’ve been chugging along fine. 
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At least in this case, there was plenty of forewarning, unlike with the magazine app, that got cut off without the publishers even being able to tell their subscribers (whose information they apparently didn’t even have) how to continue getting the magazines. It was a pretty stark demonstration of why you shouldn’t rely on Amazon as a distributor…
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They’ve killed digital magazines too. I wonder what the driving force is, too much for the royalties?
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I’m surprised they kept it going as long as they did. It was gutted two or three years ago.
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This reminds me of a piece written by a British Indian lady who had an extensive curated playlist of Bollywood music on Spotify. One day, Spotify did not renew the licence for all the music on her playlists, and suddenly they vanished, leaving her bereft.
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Which is why these days I buy physical copies of everything I want to retain hold of. I have Pandora to stream random stuff, but if it’s a band I truly love, I buy their CD’s (the physical music industry stopped advancing with the advent of mp3 players and iPhones, clearly).
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I’m surprised people still look at me funny when i say I don’t buy from Amazon. DRM, anticompetitive practices, counterfeit goods, take your pick.
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(Comixology is - I believe - one of those ‘buy each comic’ things and not a subscription service, so I’m more replying to the subscription model stuff like the post about the Bollywood music.)
I used to buy a lot of Music on Amazon Music (which at the time had DRM-free albums with MP3 downloads and a reasonably decent app for downloading them), but eventually I just hit the point where a subscription was cheaper and more reasonable and so now I just have one of the big subscription services, which I won’t name so this doesn’t come off as a weird shill for them. It’s not Amazon’s music subscription service at least.
I think the point of these subscription services is that it’s just ephemeral access, which…honestly is kind of nice for me for music at least. I pay a fee to access it, some portion of which goes to the musicians (yes, these deals are also bad, but musician profits are kind of just a nightmare scenario on everything except buying direct from them), and I don’t have to pay my own time and/or money to hold onto the files, organize them, keep them backed up, etc. It also means I can check out artists I’m interested in quickly without having to pay more money up front to find out I don’t like the album/etc. My subscription is about the cost of an album every 3 months, so it’s nowhere near as expensive as listening to new music all the time, and I’m not hammered with advertisements like on the radio.
I still have an extensive collection of MP3s, a large portion of which are legal but getting them retagged and organized and everything is kind of a huge chore. I haven’t really touched that collection in a long time, because frankly it’s just way more of a pain in my ass and I’ve got lots of other file reorganization chores to take care of that I’ve been putting off that are probably more important.
TL;DR: Subscriptions/etc are a product and they may or may not be a good deal, but I disagree with the idea that they’re just wholly useless or terrible - you just need to understand what you’re getting into and don’t pretend that you’re paying for ownership, just access.
IMO I think DRM-free games/etc are a much bigger problem, because if you buy a game on the Playstation Store, it’s locked to your account and when they turn it off in ten years or so, you lose all that access. I still buy digital games, because I’m just going to pirate them when they turn off the store and feel zero ethical conflict about it.
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I used to spend quite a bit on the old, original comixology. Until the day Amazon decided that Australians didn’t want comics and I could not buy anything from the big publishers. Literally one day I could, then the next I couldn’t, the new releases page was blank.
Fine, if you don’t want my money, you won’t get it.
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^ People with youtube playlist as their music playlist.
I hope this means that Amazon has at least updated the Kindle app to download and display the same high resolution titles that were available to read on the Comixology app. For a while there, the only way to read HD purchases was via Comixology; the Kindle versions were noticeably down-sampled. Hey, who’s up for a game of Monopoly!?
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