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Longbox Digital Comics public beta

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  • 16-03-2010 8:51pm
    #1
    Fysh
    Moderators, Arts Moderators, Regional Abroad Moderators Posts: 11,033 Mod ✭✭✭✭


    You may or may not have heard about Longbox, the digital comic viewer/sales platform/archive that was announced last year. It doesn't seem there's anything much happening with it on the iPad, but on the other hand the public beta is now available.

    I've just downloaded it to install and will post up again once I've tried it out. Meanwhile, get clicking and post up your thoughts.


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    #2
    Fysh
    Moderators, Arts Moderators, Regional Abroad Moderators Posts: 11,033 Mod ✭✭✭✭Fysh


    I meant to reply again yesterday with my thoughts on this. On which note:

    The good

    The store is straightforward enough, although it remains to be seen how well it scales and how good their search algorithms are. Similarly, the library system looks ok thus far but would really need to be stress-tested with a few hundred or thousand files before it can properly be judged.

    The bad

    It's fairly system-intensive considering what it actually does. It has a bigger footprint than something like CDisplay, and has bad load times on native files - it looks like the Longbox files themselves are just ZIP archives with some sort of obfuscation and I'm guessing the load times are due to the work involved in reversing this obfuscation. (Consider - I downloaded the Punks Winter Special in Longbox and opened it with the viewer, and it took 11 seconds to open. I opened up a CBZ file of the first issue of Some New Kind Of Slaughter from my hard drive, and it took 2 seconds. Perhaps it's an image resolution issue, but I don't think so - CDisplay doesn't have this problem).

    The ugly

    The interface isn't very appealing, though of course as a beta version they're probably going to work on this a lot. The front page in particular is cluttered and a bit of a mess. The viewer itself is marginally better than the Zuda viewer (which is currently my standard for Horrible Comics Interface) but nowhere near as good as CDisplay - it's got no full-screen viewing option, aside from anything else, and the zoom option just gives you this daft magnifying-glass type thing instead of increasing the size of the whole page.

    Overall? The viewer needs work, the overall responsiveness of the program needs to be improved, and the UI has to be refined.

    But I can still see this being something that I use regularly, if publishers sign up for it, and would probably mean I spend more money on comics over all. At the moment I spend <£20 per week on comics. I would have no problem spending another ~£3-5 a week on digital comics if that means I get another 3-5 single issues a week.

    The big unknowns for Longbox are publisher support, non-Direct-Market-Audience support, and price point. If the people behind it manage to get all three of them worked out, this could be very good for everyone involved.


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