Why? Yes, comics fans might be seen as a niche market. People like me still buy vinyl records after all. But if you can convince a comic book reader that they should pay $1.99 to ride along with Tony Stark on a screen, you’ll be able to convince people to buy Tom Wolfe, Esquire or anything else. The problem involves not only developing the proper hardware device, which Apple may have just done, but also an interactive format that sucks you in like a bound comic.

At this point in the old Tablet-as-Savior hardware discussion I’m dwelling on the obvious so let’s take a look at what’s available for Superhereo geekery on-the-go.

The fiends at Panelfly are way ahead of the curve on this one. They’ve been building up relationships with publishers with what they think can be a viable model for mobile adventure reading. Partners include several top-shelf publishers including the Disney-owned giant Marvel Comics. Panelfly currently distributes high-quality comics via an iPhone application with a built-in store– and if Panelfly’s “leaked” screen shots are any indication, their model scales up nicely to the iPad.

Stepping the platform up to the iPad is a major improvement because even though Panelfly comics look great on the iPhone, navigating the pages can be a major pain in the ass on such a tiny screen (see below). My main issue with Panelfly, as with all of the available options for mobile comics, is that purchases are tethered to Panelfly. Even though I “buy” comics from them, I don’t really own them. I just own the right to view them on Panelfly. As Apple learned a long time ago with music, tethering purchases is a major mental-impediment to consumer activity in certain areas of traditional consumption. People want to “own” their MP3′s much like comic readers will likely want the option of porting their purchases around from one platform to another. While Panelfly’s locked, DRM-like ownership model will make publishers confident that their entire catalogs won’t suddenly end up on bittorrent, I think it may also stifle people’s desire to invest in a significant collection.

Here’s a few shots from Storeyville on Panelfly for the iPhone.

The well-seated independent publisher Dark Horse Comics is trying a different approach to mobile distribution. I read the entirety of the excellent Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite on my phone and it was an engrossing experience. I read the whole thing one night in a crowded bar and barely got distracted.

Instead of using a central application or service to distribute their comics, Dark Horse is going through the labor intensive process of scaling each panel to fit the iPhone’s landscape view and packaging each issue as a standalone application. The upside is that the reading experience of Dark Horse’s apps is tailored for ease. Reading the comic is a linear, effort-free experience with no resizing, no and no bells and whistles.  The downside is that an individual, standalone applications makes managing a comic book reader’s collection cumbersome. If you see comics as something you want to come back to in the future, this could be problematic. I could always back the comics on my computer to clear up my phone (or tablet) and then reload them when I feel like it, but this seems like too many steps to really be realistic as a long term investment.

Of course, lost  longevity is almost an assumption when it comes to downloading music, apps, or books. You sacrifice the perceived perpetuity of physical objects for ephemeral bits because it’s more convenient. The challenge lies in making the ownership of bits as satisfying as the real thing. But I guess in some markets, the real thing stopped selling well long ago. Maybe it won’t matter at all.

I’ll also admit that I’m the first to gush uncontrollably when I hear about big magazine companies and newspapers developing interactive reading formats for the iPad. I think there is a huge potential source of revenue there, but I also know that this doesn’t go very far towards solving the day to day problem of getting the local news reported. The beneficiaries of the iPad will be Conde Nast and the New York Times. What about the struggling SacBee, which does some of the best reporting on California state politics? If it goes under you lose the top watchdog over the government running the world’s fifth biggest economy.

Which brings me to a book near the top of my to-read list. The Death and Life of American Journalism by Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols is out now from Nation Books. Over the last year, the authors have written a few sobering cover stories on the subject for The Nation ultimately arguing that the only way to save journalism as we know it is through government subsidies. Despite the  knee jerk reaction most people have about this solution, McChensey and Nichols point out that it’s a solution with historical precedent.  In the early republic, the government considered the voice of the fourth estate so important that they funded it as a top budget priority. According to their research it was funded at modern day equivalent of about $30 Billion a year. Yikes.

Will the government and the people be willing to pay this much? It’s hard to say.

While I’m on the topic, I’d like to point out one of the more salient points from McChensey and Nichols’ book excerpt in The Nation because I think it does a nice job of dispensing with one of the central myths about democratized media:

The main source of great journalism is compensated human labor, and as the saying goes, you get what you pay for. We’re long time advocates of citizen journalism and the blogogsphere, but our experience tells us that volunteer labor is insufficient to meet America’s journalism needs. The digital revolution has the capacity to democratize and improve journalism, but only if there is a foundation of newsrooms all of which will be digital and have digital components with adequately paid staff who interact with and provide material for the blogosphere.

The dangers of failing to see that the volunteer contributions touted by citizen-based models of journalism like The Huffington Post is apparent in “The Story Behind the Story” by veteran reporter Mark Bowden, which appeared in the October 2009 issue of The Atlantic. Bowden traces the origins of the “wise latina” attacks levied against Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomyor last spring after her nomination was announced by President Obama. “[The Reporting] was not the work of journalists, but of political hit men.” These hit men, of course, were citizen journalists who’d done the hard work of sifting through hundreds of hours of speeches to find the political weaknesses of an otherwise moderate and qualified judge. Did these citizens have the right to do this? Of course. But professional journalists should have seen this information as the irrelevant propoganda that it was. Bowden moves quickly to polemics similar to those of Nichols and McChensey:

…those giant presses and barrels of ink and fleets of delivery trucks were never what made newspapers invaluable. What gave newspapers their value was the mission and promise of journalism⎯the hope that someone was getting paid to wade into the daily tide of manure, sort through its deliberate lies and cunning half-truths, and tell a story straight.

Citizen journalists work for free, and as such, their only payoff is advancing the largely biased reasons that made citizens want to be journalists in the first place. Bowden concludes, “Unless someone quickly finds a way to make disinterested reporting pay, to compensate the modern equivalent of the ink-stained wretch… the web may yet bury [the profession].”

So I didn’t get a San Francisco Panorama. They were sold out everywhere and generally inaccessible. This means I’ll have to fork over sixteen bucks for it instead of five because the fine folks over at Mcsweeny’s either 1) didn’t want to sell that many for only five bones, or 2) because they radically underestimated demand.

Either way, it looks fantastic. There’s tons of photos of the interior over at Flickr, so check it out. Or buy it online, and keep print media in business.

Last week I joined the scores of enthusiasts crowded into the basement of the Park Branch Library in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury to listen to Rock and Roll obscurist Richie Unterberger drop some knowledge. Unterberger curates screenings of rare concert footage and lectures every other month, and if you haven’t been, you’re missing out.

This particular lecture was particularly enthusiastic because it’s about the Velvet Underground, the subject  of Unterberger’s latest book, White Light/ White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day by Day. Unterberger lectured over rare photos from his book and showed some moving footage of a 1972 performance by Lou Reed, John Cale and Nico. This performance happened, of course, a few years after Reed, Cale, and Nico left the VU, but it’s high-quality– more than can be said about anything recorded during the VU’s prime. Click here for some of it bastardized by YouTube.

Besides plugging his book, Unterberger made a plea on behalf of local booksellers: Buy Local.

Check it out…

Yesterday I was  reading a friend’s copy of the Nation, and I started feeling guilty about not subscribing to some of my favorite magazines and  thereby contributing to their decline and demise. I browsed their websites determined to spend at least some of my stimulus money propping up quality journalism.

I discovered that, yes, I can afford to subscribe to a couple of rags, so they’ll be piling up next to my bed unread soon. But the real point is that I discovered the recently launched New Yorker Book Club.  In their own words:

A spinoff of The Book Bench, the magazine’s blog on all matters literary, The Book Club will be an ongoing collaboration between our editors and writers and our audience.

Each month, we will tackle a different book, of the past or the present. The selections will be eclectic, but will share one main criterion: they resist easy answers….

This isn’t the first online book club, but it might actually motivate me to close the damn Google Reader and to consume book cover-to-cover. Why?

First of all the bait is great: April’s selection is Down and Out in Paris in London by George Orwell.

Second, the language describing the club is just so damn endearing.  I didn’t know such experiences existed, but I desperately want “Adventures in Communal Reading.”

Finally, this book club gives me something Oprah never could:  Essays by smarty-pants New Yorker staff writers like George Packer  to accompany my reading adventure…

I ran to my local bookstore and dropped thirty bucks on Down and Out… and next months selection Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer.

I’ve already plowed through half of Down and Out… so I’m optimistic. I’ll let you al know how it goes.