Scribd teams up with Marvel
 

Caught this on the Newsarama site.

Looking through the article it sounds like Marvel will be making trade paperbacks available, as opposed to single issues of its comics.

The interesting thing to me is that Marvel already has its own subscription service, Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited. I wonder if Marvel is looking to move out of that business space?

I don't think Marvel has had the best luck with their digital subscription service. When they started out, that was the only way they did digital comics. Since then, they have started selling individual issues (including digital-only issues) and partnering with Comixology. They may be thinking they could reach a wider audience partnering with someone else's larger universe of subscriptions who might not subscribe to a Marvel-only option. It's worth a try, I suppose.

I am a Scribd subscriber, and when I told her about this, my 12-year-old daughter immediately started in on the My Little Pony Friendship is Magic collection, which is apparently extensive. LOL.

I don't see Marvel as looking to get out of Marvel Unlimited. The Scribd deal seems to be yet another way for them to get their IP in front of people.

You can buy digital collections and issues from them on both Comixology and at marvel.com (same selection, far as I can tell), subscribe and have access to thousands of issues older than 6 months via Marvel Unlimited, buy a variety of collections from Amazon and Google Play books, and now have access to a large assortment of collections via Scribd.

I think it's about meeting consumers where they are and getting and keeping the Marvel brand out there.

This is not to say that Marvel Unlimited couldn't use some work and they might see that as a losing proposition in the long run, but that's another discussion.

There's a time article in reference to that also. Scribd Launches Its ‘Netflix for Comics’ With More Than 10,000 Titles - The e-book and audiobook subscription service that has been likened to a “Netflix for books” is now expanding to comic books.

I don't read a lot of comic books, but I admit it's cool. I only got the free 3-months subscription before though. If it keeps improving I may think of subscribing.

Quick question (or two): do you need a specific reader/app for scribd, can you download content for offline reading?

You have to use their app. However, up to 20 items at a time can be stored locally for offline reading or listening.

I tried Marvel Unlimited a couple years ago, and the catalog had a lot of holes in it, so that any story arc I attempted to read, I would have had to purchase books outside the Unlimited selection to get the whole thing. The apps at that time were bad (not sure if there was an Android app at first, but the HTML5 webapp was usable on Android), but improved a bit before my subscription ran out, so maybe they're even better now.

I just signed up for a 3-month trial on Scribd, and the comic selection beyond Marvel looks quite good. The Dynamite Publishers lineup is especially interesting. The Android and web apps, however, are just barely usable, with the comics experience being the worst. It also sucks that there's no way to push text to a Kindle. Right now it's hard to say how much I'll use the app, given the subpar user experience and the fact that I've only found one item (The Bees audiobook) that was actively on my TBR. However, I did add plenty of comics and a few books and audiobooks to my scribd queue.

Ah, one more wishlist title found--the Southern Reach trilogy on audio. I'd rather have both audio and text, but it's something.

Hope I am not reviving a thread that is too old, but I have been using scribd extensively for a couple of months exclusively for comics, and wanted to share some frustrating user interface issues that I ran across.

First the good:

1-Large and diverse collection of comics titles. Marvel, IDW, Dynamite, and others, lots of different stuff to read for lots of different tastes

2-Lets you download as many titles at once as you have room for, no artificial limitations there. I like to have a lot of titles stored offline since I never know what I will be in the mood to read


Now, the bad stuff, as of the latest version from a few days ago (I am using the Android version on a 12" Samsung tablet)

1-Very Low Resolution Files compared to comixology, kindle, etc. The file sizes when downloaded are tiny and the art and text have noticeable jaggies and pixellation. Not good and really detracts from the reading experience.


2-When you look at your list of downloaded titles, it is not sorted alphabetically, only by download date. So there's no way to easily remember/find a title you are looking for in an alphabetical list.

To go along with this, downloaded titles are only displayed in list view, no option for a grid. So on a tablet there is a huge amount of wasted white screen space on the right hand side, and any sizable collection of downloaded titles requires a lot of scrolling.

Lastly there is no option to save downloaded titles to an SD card, the huge 64GB card sitting in my tablet can not hold any or the titles, while the tablet's main memory is running out of room.


3-When browsing their list of cloud titles to decide which ones to download, there is no visual reminder/checkmark/etc. to show you which ones are already on your device.

So, you look at a title in their cloud and have to try and remember if you already have it, and to double check you have to switch over to your non-alphabetical list of downloaded titles and check if you see it anywhere. Very frustrating.


4-Individual issues not hierarchially grouped under a "series" icon. In other comics apps like comixology, you first click on an icon that represents a series, then you get icons or a list the individual issues in that series. With the scribd app, every individual issue od a series is on the same root level as every other title. It makes for very long and messy lists when browsing.

Compounding this problem is no visual differentiation between individual issues and trade collections that collect them. So you often have trouble figuring out if you are downloading an individual issue of a comic or the trade that collects a few issues of it. Other apps like comixology divide single issues and collections into their own sections of the list, and make the difference very clear. In Scribd its just all mixed together in a bog hodgepodge.


5-No "preview" of interior artwork when browsing titles. Apps like kindle or comixology show you a 3-page preview so you can quickly decide if you like the art before proceeding any further. With scribd, all you see is the cover, and to see any further you need to click on "start reading" and then wait while it loads the entire comic, every last page, into the cache (which can take a while with longer collections).


6-When you browse a title and read a few pages, the title is automatically added to your library. This is very frustrating because your library gets filled up with titles you have no wish to have added, and then you have to delete them. Titles should only be added to your library of you actually click the “add to library” button.


7-When you search for a title in comics, you get a lot of unwanted search results for prose books and audiobooks. This makes the search more confusing and harder to look at the results when you are only looking for comics.


8-Incomplete runs of titles. For example, there is a comic adaptation of Clive Barker’s “Nightbreed” with about 15 issues, but Scribed only has a single issue of it, #7 right in the middle of the run. I don’;t understand why the publisher would only provide a single issue in the run and not even there first issue?

9-There are other assorted issues as well that I would categorize more as bugs, such as:

- a very large amount of app crashes

-“spacer pages” meant to preserve double page spreads when viewing 2 pages at a time on the web version, but in an app where its always one page at a time, they are unnecessary and distracting

-random pages of a comic are sometimes either missing, or repeat themselves a few pages later


For whatever its worth, I made sure to send the above feedback to the product manager at scribd and she was very responsive ion multiple emails back to me, apparently it has been shared with the development team and engineers, and they are looking at all of the issues I sent them closely.

Having said that, almost none of these issues have been corrected in the three months and 2-3 updates the app has had since I sent in the issues, but hopefully some will be addressed in the future. I would think some of these would be very trivial to correct on a coding level, and was disappointed that none of them were addressed in the last 2-3 updates since I sent them the info.

Thanks!

I know this doesn't solve all the problems, but there is a way to remove stuff from your library. When you first enter Scribd, one of the options at the bottom is "Library." You can go there and select everything you want to get rid of, and then one of the options at the bottom is "Remove."

Yeah, that's true and I used that feature often. What bugged me though, is that I had to use that delete feature in the first place to delete stuff that was in my library, that I never chose to add.

I would often have to go through my library and delete all these titles that I never chose to add, that were only there because I had quickly browsed through the titles for just a minute or two, and then decided I didn't want to add them to my library.

Yet just from browsing them to decide that, Scribd would add them anyway without asking me.