Will the iPad Revolutionize the Comic Book Industry? Or Kill It?

That's the question recently posed by Wired.

From the article...

American comic book fans live for Wednesdays. That’s the day the new issues arrive. Every major American comic book publisher uses a single distributor, Diamond, to ship boxes of their latest releases to roughly 2,200 comics retail stores across the country. The shop owners—or their minions—put that week’s crop of Batman or X-Men or Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the shelves, and then the fans arrive. A lot of them go to the same store every week, where they have a “pull list” on file, books they’ve asked to be set aside so they’ll never miss a single pulse-pounding issue. It’s a tradition.

To be more specific, it’s a dying tradition. The Wednesday crowd is the old-school audience, collectors who are willing to shell out $3 or $4 for a stapled-together pamphlet that they’ll put in a plastic bag with acid-free cardboard and store in a long white box. Those customers have been trickling away for years.

But that’s OK, because about two decades ago publishers picked up a second category of customers. These newer readers generally prefer the classier term graphic novel and would rather buy their comics as squarebound books. They might pick up a stack of them five or six times a year, rather than chasing issues every week. That was just fine with publishers, especially the industry’s 8,000-pound super-gorillas Marvel (owned by Disney) and DC Comics (owned by Time Warner). For them, graphic novels meant that decades’ worth of back catalog could generate income again and provide an entrée into bookstores.

A third group of readers has come along even more recently: Internet- savvy young fans who download pirated versions of everything. At first the comics industry didn’t pay much attention to this new generation. Unlike the music and movie businesses, comics experienced an unprecedented boom in the mid-2000s, thanks to the rise of graphic novels, as well as manga from Japan. Besides, the fan-made scans of new issues that showed up online, usually just a few hours after the print versions arrived in stores, were kind of a hassle to download and read on a computer. The unwieldy nature of the whole process made the print-comics industry feel as though digital comics, legit or otherwise, weren’t worth the trouble.

Then Apple introduced the iPad.