iPad comics? Or, “Will there ever be an app for that?”

There’s been a lot of hullabaloo about comic apps on the iPad lately.

With print media rapidly declining in popularity, I can completely understand panicky publishers jumping onto the iPad bandwagon in the hopes of recouping readership. The thing that gets me, though, is that print publishers are still expecting digital readers to adhere to the print business model. That is, they expect to sell a relatively small serving of material for a few dollars a pop. That worked for print, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a smart move for digital comics.

Why? Well, for starters you’re asking people to pay a relatively high press for a smattering of offline material that’s locked to a specific handheld device (namely, the iPad) and one that still hasn’t found widespread adoption at that (yet.)

Alternately, webcomics are accessible to nearly everyone on a wide array of online devices. Sure, you can’t read them offline (unless you save the individual pages for offline use, that is) but in five years time, who’s going to be “offline” anyway?

Dear Comic Book Industry: Think Netflix, not iTunes. (But that’s a whole ‘nother rant for another day.)

So will there ever be a Shadowbinders app? I honestly don’t see the point right now. Even if we were to give it away, it’s nothing that you can’t already get for free on your iPad or iPod right now anyway. Seems kind of redundant to me, but if there’s enough demand, we may consider it.

Anyway, the Shadowbinders pages are sized the way they are so as to be easily viewable on an iPad. They’re a little on the large size compared to many other webcomics, but with ever-increasing screen resolutions, I wanted to make sure we were ready for whatever the future might hold.

(Reposted from the Shadowbinders blog)