Amazon’s Empire Grows, Acquires Digital Comics Service Comixology
ComiXology is the best place to go if you want to buy and read digital comics. So it’s not too surprising that yesterday the company’s CEO and co-founder, David Steinberger, went onto his site and announced that the company would be acquired by Amazon—you know, the online retail giant that sells everything and, soon, will own everything.
According to the post, ComiXology’s being folded into Amazon won’t do much to actually change the company and how it operates, at least from consumers’ point of view:
“ComiXology will retain its identity as an Amazon subsidiary and we’re not anywhere near done ‘taking comics further.’ We are confident that—with Amazon by our side, who shares our desire for innovation and a relentless focus on customers—we’ve only just begun.”
While it’s not clear how much Amazon is paying for the buy, it is pretty obvious how the company will stand to benefit. The company has had a deal in place with DC Comics for a while to offer many of its digital comics to the Kindle Fire tablet via the Amazon store. But ComiXology has been providing digital comics from Marvel, DC, Image, Dark Horse, Oni, and a whole slew of independent comics publishers for a long, long time, being the single best place for anyone to get a digital comics fix. If you want digital comics, you go to Comixology, and you read it in ComiXology’s Comics app. Now all that money is going to funnel right to Amazon, and ComiXology will reap the benefits of Amazon’s muscle when it comes to getting more licensing deals and being able to beat out any potential competition.
We won’t know for sure what effect the acquisition will have on ComiXology’s business or bottom line. But it seems as though very few companies have not gotten great rewards from being brought into Jeff Bezos’s ecosystem.