Comixology - Comics & Manga -PC用

I miss the in-app purchases, but I understand that the change was necessary. I have no major complaints, but would love to have the ability to make my own in-app reading lists and to sort comics I own by publisher and creator. Nevertheless, the app is just fine as it is.

This is my review of the new app app, not of app itself. The Good: As an app for storing and reading a library of digital comics, this really is the only game in town. The "guided view" system makes reading comics on iOS devices a really great experience. It's so much better than PDF pinching! The Bad: Up until last month, readers could also browse the app store in the app and make purchases there as well. The feature was disabled in the new version. Now purchases must be made through the website, which is clunky and inconvenient. Preview pages don't display nicely on the full website among other issues. The Ugly: There may be many good reasons why app eliminated in-app purchasing. One of those reasons may be the approval process that every single book had to go through before it could be sold through an iTunes app. This cumbersome process may have meant that books couldn't be released on schedule, and adult themed titles were not available through the app. Ok, these could be good reasons. But the problem is that there was no really visible attempt to communicate to their customers about this huge change. If app had started an awareness campaign a month or so before this change happened, people would have still been disappointed, but it would have showed more respect to customers and helped them understand and prepare for the change to come. That's where the company went wrong. Still, I was a kid, I have not been a comic buyer or reader until I downloaded the app app. This app got me back into comics! So I hope I get used to the new setup and regain my trust in this company. But right now, I can't rate this app higher as a main feature has been abruptly lost.

面倒な仕様になり使う気が失せる

Amazon bought app in April 2014. Now they don’t have to pay Apple’s 30% surcharge for each purchase we make, but what have we lost? There is no in-app store, no in-app browsing, no buy buttons. Not even a link to their website (per Apple’s rules). The app app is now just a reader. For a new user just installing the app, it opens up to a blank screen saying in effect, “Hey, go get some comics! Somehow…” You can only buy comics from their website, if you can discover the URL on your own. You must use a credit card or PayPal. In dollars. My iTunes account runs on iTunes gift cards (in yen) from the convenience store, so that’s not going to happen. I have just shy of 700 comics in the old version, probably 500 of which were spontaneous snap purchases while in the flow of reading, clicking the “Want to buy and read the next issue right now?” button that was shown after finishing the final page of the current issue. Can’t do that anymore. Now it just adds it to your cart — it’s up to you to purchase it on the web — and the flow of reading is broken. I wouldn’t say I’m outraged, but I’m now wary, and this new system does drop app below my threshold of inconvenience. I doubt I’ll be buying much of anything from them until things change in some fundamental, unlikely way. The DC and Marvel apps (both made by app) still have their in-app storefronts, but it was the independent comics that were most interesting to me. Also, now that they’ve shown their willingness to mess things up in their flagship app, how long will it be until the satellite apps are also neutered? It’s made me reluctant to trust them with further purchases. I have no need for paper comics, nor are there any local English-comic stores, so I can’t even use that as a fallback position. I’ll just buy no comics. Raw convenience was also the reason app was making a dent into piracy, so it’s odd to see them deliberately reduce that advantage. Now it’s like a public-service warning about the dangers of purchasing DRM’ed media. I can only speculate that Amazon bought app specifically to kill it (as they did with the ebook reader app Stanza), so that reading comics on the Kindle becomes the “best” comics reading experience by default. I don’t think the good-intentioned people on app’s side realized just how drastically Amazon was willing to weaken the immediate user experience to serve Amazon’s longer-range goals. Now we all know.