It has been a tumultuous two for Comixology. What was the gold standard for the digital comics reading experience has been whittled away in favour of merging it with Amazon’s Kindle ecosystem. The final nail in the coffin appears to be the Comixology app, Amazon’s dedicated comics reading app, which will be sunsetted on December 4th.
You might’ve seen the following message if you opened the app today.
There’s no reason to panic if you see it. All you need to do is download the Kindle app on your preferred device(s) and sign in with the same credentials. This will begin a sync process, which might take some time if you have an extensive library. Luckily, all reading progress will carry across.
The comics reading experience is pretty much the same as the sunsetted app. Where you may notice a difference is in the library management. The Kindle app has been updated to accommodate the comics transition with features that Comixology General Manager Jeff DiBartolomeo described in a statement below:
The upgraded Kindle app experience is already available and has key Comixology features for enjoying a digital library of comics, graphic novels, and manga, including grouping titles by series; hiding and unhiding specific titles; library filtering for comics content; in-app borrowing for users of our unlimited subscription services; and additional options to read on the web.
Library filtering will be vital now that comics, graphic novels, and manga are mixed with eBooks. Fervent eBook readers will find this handy as their library would be chaotic without these options.
Those who prefer to read on the web can rejoice. New features have been made available that make reading comics much easier. Although, to be cynical, these get the experience up to where Comixology was when it was shut down 18+ months ago.
Comixology has gone through many changes since early 2022. It was originally a dedicated service with its own website and app running on an entirely different codebase. However, in February 2022, it was absorbed into the wider Amazon ecosystem (Amazon bought Comixology in 2014), where the reading and purchase experience aligned more with Kindle. At that time, a new Comics app that looked like a rebadged Kindle app was released. It had some basic functions of the old Comixology app but felt less refined. Throughout 2022 and 2023, the experience was polished to be something that comics readers put up with as there was no way to move their libraries elsewhere.
Digital comics have become a fractured landscape, with many publishers offering their own stores or reading services. Some of these offer DRM-free downloads, while others are tied to subscriptions or accounts. Readers enjoyed Comixology as it allowed them to keep their whole library together, meaning many have stayed with the Amazon solution out of necessity than personal preference.
Comixology’s absorption also spurred a handful of start-ups looking to capture the lost experience. Services like Omnibus and Global Comix are still in their early days but offer an alternative to the Amazon ecosystem.
There has been a lot of discussion about the enshitification of the Internet over the past year, with Amazon being one of the drivers of this. For the reasons mentioned above, digital comics readers have felt this hard, making the loss of the original Comixology hard felt. This is likely not the fault of members of what’s left of the Comixology team, who are passionate about comics and the reading experience, but appears to be a much deeper-rooted problem with Amazon’s business model.
From a software development perspective, I can understand why Comixology was absorbed into Amazon. Maintaining two tech stacks for reading digital comics makes development and bug fixing harder. Unfortunately, it has taken more than 18 months to reach the baseline that the absorption in Amazon should’ve been.
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