SThe new subscription service Swoosh for digital comics has been available since Tuesday. The service is an offer from the publishers Egmont Ehapa and Panini, which makes 900 comic titles flexibly digitally readable. The titles included in the service for EUR 9.99 per month include current editions of series such as The Funny Paperback, Asterix, Superman and Batman. Swoosh can be used in a desktop version, but also as an app on mobile devices. In its statement on Swoosh, Ehapa-Verlag deliberately draws parallels to streaming providers for films and series, such as Netflix.
Jörg Risken, responsible for the magazine division at Ehapa-Verlag and thus also for comics, gives all collectors the all-clear. “Our new offer should supplement the printed comics and not replace them.” However, one wanted to take account of the changing offers in the media landscape. “Readers are increasingly interested in digital offers,” says Risken in an interview with the FAZ. That’s why now is the right time to launch such a digital offer.
The catalog on Swoosh includes the latest titles from the comic publishers Egmont Ehapa and Panini, but will also be populated with classic magazines. “While such niches would often be too expensive for a new printed edition, we can serve them with our digital offering,” explains Risken. The titles appearing on Swoosh remain hand-picked and the publishers’ entire archive is not intended to be found on the service.
Growing enthusiasm for comics
Overall, the comic market is developing dynamically at the moment. The specialist magazine “Buchreport” regularly publishes surveys on the book market in Germany and, in the course of this, also statistics on the comic market. According to the latest report published in May, the total sales of the comics genre grew by 10 percent to 264 million euros in 2022. Manga sales grew the most: Japanese comics sold 25 percent more.
What is striking about the report is that, contrary to other trends in retail, the stationary market can hold its own against online trade. Accordingly, the online book trade lost 4 percentage points of its sales in the comics sector to stationary trade. This means that stationary trade accounts for 36 percent of sales and online trade for 21 percent. The comic book trade was able to increase its share of sales from 12 to 15 percent.
Risken is confident that the new service will be popular. The doors are also slowly being opened for other publishers. “For starters, however, we kept the group of publishers we speak to small,” he says. Negotiations between the houses were often protracted. They want to initiate more talks and find more partners in the coming months.
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