Marvel Comics/Comics

The status of the iPad as an ebook reader is well understood, but when you say ebook, most people tend to think "Pride & Prejudice" a lot sooner than, say, "Power Man & Iron Fist". The iPad's colour screen better represents comic book pages than just dry text, however, and the very similar Marvel Comics and simply-titled Comics applications demonstrate this superbly.

Both applications are fundamentally the same thing, built by a firm called Iconology. They're a combination comic book store and comics reader, with the key difference being that the Marvel application features only Marvel comics — characters like The Incredible Hulk, X-Men, Spider-Man and Iron Man — while the Comics app has a broader range of publishers on board. Marvel's comics offerings do appear within the Comics app at the same price as you'll pay in the Marvel application, but despite using the same code base, neither will recognise purchases from one app to the other, so you could "buy" the same title twice by accident if you're not careful.

The pricing is fairly flat across both applications. Marvel charges $2.49 per issue, irrespective of title, while the issues available in Comics start at $1.19 per issue. Both applications feature a wide range of completely free content as well, and you can sample a short preview of some selected titles.

The pricing on either App is a clear demonstration of how eBook publishing should work. There's no paper to print. Distribution isn't free, but it's much cheaper than a truck or plane full of comic books. Instead of paying anywhere from $5 to $10 per issue, as import comics have been lately, you're paying a current maximum of $2.49, making it much more of an easy impulse buy. All purchases are tied into a comics "account" that you set up when first installing the application, and it works across devices, so if you install the readers to your iPod Touch or iPhone, you can download them there. It would be nice to see some longer-form works and perhaps graphic novels offered further down the track, but as a starting point for pricing electronic works correctly, this gets it spot on.

The reading experience is generally very good. You've got two choices when it comes to reading on an iPad. There's a full screen view, which will rotate to widescreen if you flip the iPad around, or a guided frame-by-frame view that moves basically between speech bubbles, giving the comic an almost animated feel. On an iPhone or iPod Touch, the guided view is the only way to play, as the text would be way too small otherwise. Although some panels in full screen view on an iPad still suffer a little bit from the text being too small, and the automatic scrolling sometimes gets it wrong. It seems to only think left to right, top to bottom, meaning some character discussions get a little disjointed. These are minor quibbles however if you are reading on an iPad, as it's a very comfortable way to carry around plenty of comics with you with no worries about creasing the covers.

Marvel: http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/marvel-comics/id350027738
Comics: http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/comics/id303491945