As I said, I hadn't purchased anything from them for a year prior. I'd also canceled my Prime account early in 2025. Both part of a decidedly conscious effort on my part to separate myself from their influence. So I'm not mad or upset about losing the account. I'm a little annoyed that they flatly lied to me about why they were canceling my account, but clearly they found something about me and/or my account they didn't like and they actively no longer want me as a customer anyway.
That was the last week or two of 2025. However, it only just dawned on me that I will have also lost my Comixology account in the process as well. Obviously, since it took me a few weeks to even realize that, it's not a big concern either. Once Amazon purchased Comixology and tried incorporating it into their Kindle format, the user interface was so awful that I only used it when I absolutely had to. (I think the last time I'd looked at it was in early 2023 when I was an Eisner Awards judge and spent every free moment for the first part of that year reading comics.) But back before Amazon got their hands on that platform, I'd amassed a good number of comics on that account. At a rough guess, maybe 1000? 1500?
Despite Comixology originally launching in 2007, I don't think most people started really paying attention until 2010 or so when A) they launched a stand-alone app that came pre-loaded on Apple's then-brand-spanking-new iPad and B) that happened to coincide with Marvel and DC having their titles released digitally through Comixology. That's probably about when I signed up as well.
However, it was quite a while longer -- years, I think -- before I bought my first comic digitally. I snagged plenty of free ones though! A lot of titles had one or two issues for free. Marvel had a couple of massive promotions where they'd give away 500 free comics or something, in addition to for-a-while-weekly releases of some newish issues from both Marvel and DC. And there was a weird incident when they were in some agreement with Amazon, but before they were bought out, where someone at Amazon accidentally mis-maked a slew of Marvel Masterworks with a cost of zero; that only lasted for, like, a half hour before someone corrected it, but I was able to grab digital copies of something like the first fifteen years of Fantastic Four stories!
The reasons I wasn't actually buying anything, though, came out of a business model arguement people were having right at the start. Namely, that when you bought a digital comic on Comixology, you didn't own it. There was very clear language early on that you were essentially just renting the comic until such time as either A) you closed your account, or B) Comixology decided they didn't want you to have it any more for some reason. You couldn't download the issue at all, not even a DRM'd version.
In the fifteen-ish years I had a Comixology account, I think I paid for only three issues. All of which were expressly for the purpose of doing research for some articles -- two were issues that were too expensive to buy for real and hadn't been reprinted in any capacity, and one was a issue I already had, but I needed to do some research while I was travelling and didn't have access to my collection. So from a stric cost perspective, losing my Amazon account -- and those digital comics I paid for 8 or 10 years ago -- cost me only a few bucks.
I definitely have a much larger collection of digital comics that I've downloaded from other places (legally!) sitting on my hard drive. Definitely a lot more independent work there, of course, and some of them are older as I'd been looking at digital comics for more than a couple years before Comixology. Many of them are still avaiable online in various place, so I could download them again if I needed to (I seem to recall a good number of them are, in fact, public domain comics pulled from Digitial Comic Museum, now celebrating their fifteenth anniversary!) but it's not necessary. They're on my hard drive, which is backed up nightly. They're my copies, and I don't have to worry about losing them just because some nameless entity decided I wasn't an account worth having any more.
I also recently set up my own media server. I'd done a somewhat makeshift version of that with my music some time ago, just "hosting" MP3s ripped from my CD collection 15-20 years ago. But using a refurbished old laptop dedicated to hosting up files, and a relatively cheap ($150 US) 8 TB hard drive, I can throw movies and TV shows on as well. (Mostly streaming captures through legitimate sources, though there's a number of public domain works downloaded from the Internet Archive and YouTube as well.)
What's been interesting with video files is that, even in the few weeks I've been loading my system with them, I've seen several that I captured from legal sources, only to see them disappear a week or two later. Obviously due to a contract expiration, but it's another way emphasize the same point from before: that unless you have a copy of some media in your home, you don't own it. I was particularly annoyed a year and change ago when I was watching Marvel's Runaways on Disney+ when they pulled the whole series just as I finishing season 1. I checked Amazon Prime and they had only seasons 1 and 3 -- no clue why season 2 wasn't available. I did find just this past week a notice that Tubi will allegedly begin streaming it in February, but I don't know if that's necessarily the whole series or just certain seasons. If I had downloaded all of those back when I was watching it, it would've been a non-issue.
Again, my point is that we're living in an era when many of the things you've bought and paid for can be pulled out from under you with little-to-no notice. People have been warning for YEARS that any of these platforms -- for comics or music or movies -- are only as permanent as the company hosting them feels like. Maybe that is indefinitely. More than likely, probably not though. But we're fortunately at a point where you can get a good sized hard drive relatively inexpensively, so it might be worth considering hooking one up to an old laptop or something and figure out how to host all your media locally. (As long as your machine still works, it's honestly pretty easy. It took only took me several months to set mine up because I had to get an old laptop in working order in the first place. Once I got things basically working again, getting it set up to host media wasn't much more difficult than installing an app.)
I think things will only get more chaotic and unpredictable in the near future, so if you're able, I'd strongly recommend trying to get your media house in order before you lose all your music or movies or comics!
0 comments:
Post a Comment