Summary
- Sweet Shop and Image Comics are teaming up for 400 titles in a new digital storefront launching this summer.
- Sweet Shop will offer easy mobile purchasing of HD comics and an option for publishers to offer DRM-free books.
- The features of Sweet Shop aim to cater to comic fans, offering a more consumer-friendly experience than competitors.
Digital comic books aren’t in the best place on Android ever since Amazon moved Comixology to its own servers. Comixology was more than just a digital storefront; it was a platform, one that many publishers used, including Marvel and Image Comics, for their respective apps. Sadly, these apps are long gone; their code wasn’t being maintained, and so they were shuttered. But from the ashes comes new competition, and a fresh entrant known as Sweet Shop has revealed a partnership with Image Comics to serve up nearly 400 titles when Sweet Shop officially launches on Android and iOS this summer.
These are my favorite places to buy digital comic books for my tablets and e-readers
There’s more to online comics than just Amazon
Image Comics will soon be available on a new digital comic book store
Sweet Shop is set to land this summer
Even Image Comics is getting in on today’s announcement, detailing in its own press release that 400 of Image’s best titles will be available on the Sweet Shop storefront when it launches this summer, comics like Spawn and The Walking Dead (via Good E-Reader). It would appear that Sweet Shop is setting itself up for easy purchases on mobile, which means you’ll be able to purchase Image’s digital comics from the Sweet Shop app using in-app purchases instead of having to navigate to a webpage. Image will even offer DRM-free versions of its comics as PDFs downloadable from the app, something Sweet Shop says any of its publishers can opt into.
It would also appear that Sweet Shop will sell digital manga alongside comic books, though it’s unclear which publishers are on board at this time. Markebly, HD comics are a listed feature, something digital manga needs more of.
Overall, Sweet Shop appears to be structuring itself with features designed to appeal to comic fans, eliminating the inconveniences of its competitors, like Amazon’s SD manga and the inability to sell digital titles through its app. When behemoths like Amazon are too big to offer the features readers want, like convenient purchases and HD art, it leaves room for a pro-consumer store to rise up, and Sweet Shop appears to understand this.
Still, it’s early days, and we don’t even know what titles will be available on Sweet Shop beyond 400 Image comics, so only time will tell if users will flock to the service; it’ll be an uphill battle against giants like DC and Marvel and their subscription apps. But at the end of the day, mobile needs more comic stores, especially ones that sell HD content with the potential of no DRM. After all, if the choice is an SD comic/manga or something in HD that comes with a DRM-free PDF, the choice seems pretty obvious, especially when you’ll be able to make that purchase without leaving the app you’re browsing.
We’ll likely hear much more about Sweet Shop before it launches this summer, so stay tuned, as this digital comic book and manga store already sounds like it has the correct direction to lease fans; it’ll simply need some killer content to fill the digital shelves.
