There is a new section in the iBookstore devoted to comics and graphic novels. This is a big improvement and highly useful for anyone who's tried to find titles in this genre amidst the mess that is the iBookstore - one of the most user
un-friendly retail environments ever devised, which had made it almost impossible to actually find graphic novels before now (unless "Graphic Novel" was in the title). There are now subcategories for Graphic Novels, Comics, and Manga, which include some 1500 publications from the likes of Disney, Marvel, and Random House.
Interestingly, these all appear to be in the original fixed layout .epub format rather than the new .ibooks editions, which seems to be reserved for textbooks at the moment. This is natural enough, since the specific layout conventions of comics precludes the need for rich multimedia additions, although if there ever was a medium that could readily incorporate multimedia, and benefit greatly from it, it's graphic novels, due to their highly visual nature.
What I find most curious, however, is that all the content in the several editions I've downloaded are composed of single background images with the text incorporated, rather than including live text layers one can interact with, rendering them little more than .pdf's, something of a step backwards in my opinion. This seems to imply that comics readers don't require the use of dictionaries or search functions for their reading experience, that somehow graphic novels are not really novels at all (let alone great literature); as if comics inherently incorporate a limited vocabulary and plot structures so simplistic no one would ever possibly need to consult a dictionary or use search terms for any conceivable reason. In actuality, of course, they probably just think it's too difficult to format dialogue boxes to be bothered with (and they're justified to some extent in that assessment).
As an introductory promo, for a limited time, Marvel is offering issue #1 of
The New Avengers for free, so you can have a look at an iBooks graphic novel risk-free. However, given that there is no Guided Panel View, which is standard fare in comics apps these days (including Marvel's own app for the iPad), and is now even in use on the Kindle Fire, this seems a real let-down to me, and I can't see why you'd buy the iBooks version when you can get the more developed version via Marvel's iPad app instead. Of course, given the size of the iPad screen, you don't really
need the guided view (as you do on the Fire), but it's still a feature you're not getting here that is included elsewhere. So we'll have to wait and see how well these new iBooks editions fare, and what kind of feedback they receive from readers.
