No Laughing Matter: PSP Comic Reader

By Daniel Lipscombe

The PSP Comic Reader is of monumental importance for the Sony handheld. Get it right and legions of people will rush to buy the platform, its success perhaps paving the way for future programs to be brought to the PlayStation store. Get it wrong, though, and many fans will lose confidence in the system.

The PSP Comic Reader is a simple program. You collect your favourite comics on your memory stick, and the reader will display them dynamically for you to read. With just the press of a button the reader scans the pages much like your eye would, hovering over large splash pages and zooming in on details, but there are other little additions too. Though it sounds rather silly on paper, if there’s a particularly explosive scene in your comic then the screen will shake to highlight it. You can load MP3s to listen to whilst reading, and you can control the zoom function to see more of the details or see the whole page as one.

To actually use the reader is a joy. What could have felt gimmicky doesn’t, not even for a second. However, as good as the platform is for reading comics, it will be nothing without proper support, pricing and storage. Sony is sitting on a knife’s edge with this app, and getting any of these things wrong could be another strike to the company’s already shaky PSP issue.

//The price is right
Comics aren’t the cheapest thing, with single issues ranging from 99 pence to a few of your sterling. They are quite obviously a paper-based product which means costs in many places, initial wages for the writers, artists and editors, costs for paper stock, printing costs, shipping and delivery and, of course, their storage. Digital comics are removing all but the initial wages for the creative staff, so in theory, the price of each comic or storyline needs to be a lot cheaper than its paper cousin.

No prices have been announced yet, so all conversation is merely assumption. But this is a different conversation to digital distribution. Videogames are massive files, upwards of six gigabytes. The digital comic I downloaded was only 45 megabytes; bandwidth will surely not be anywhere near as big an issue. With all the costs removed and no reason to charge for bandwidth consumption, surely the price for the reader will be low.

The biggest issue regarding cost, though, is… well, what will we receive for our money? I don’t mean in terms of reading material, but in DRM rights. It’s such a debated topic, and there’s no real need to air more laundry here, but there’s a need to break down why this is important to comic fans. A mint condition first appearance of Spiderman is worth roughly 90,000 USD. Comics are about collecting and, to some, resale values. This needs to be reflected in the pricing. It’s obvious that you can’t ‘resell’ a digital comic book, while there’s always a chance to do so with a real one. If a fan can’t resell it, the DRM should allow them to move it back and forth and re-download it as often as they like. Digital comics also lose revenue opportunities for publishers such as Marvel ,who tend to offer variant covers for their issues or signed issues for the hardcore collector.

And breaking down the potential pricing issue uncovers other potential problems for the reader.

//Holy reasons for failure, Batman
Comic books area collectors’ medium. I collected comics for years and know only too well the issues with storing so many comics. This could be an issue with the reader as well. It offers an opportunity to carry your collection in your pocket, much like the popular E-Readers from Sony and Amazon. But at 45 Megabytes per issue, there isn’t much chance to store thousands of comics as you would with books on a Kindle. In fact, if each comic is the same size, then you could only keep 91 comics on a four gigabyte card. Not exactly a collection.

A side problem Sony and the comic publishers will face isn’t bringing new customers or even old collectors to the market, but bringing current collectors on board. I stopped collecting due to lack of space, so if this fixes that issue, then I’ll likely take up this form of reading. But those that already have thousands are unlikely to jump over. They’ve already built their collection over years, so why give up and move on to a different format? The only real way to combat this is to include a digital code inside comics for the PSP version, although that wouldn’t stop people strolling into Forbidden Planet and sneakily noting them down…

There seems to be a little more to it than just putting a few comics on your PSP, and Sony needs to get thinking on these issues, or watch the program fail.

That program is lovely as it stands. There are minimal issues with it; not being able to see the artwork properly, with A4 pages now crammed down to your PSP screen, is one of the bigger ones. But there are many things that need to work out in order for the comic reader to become the next big thing. And I truly hope that it does just that.