Slave Labor sells digital at Eyemelt

Newsarama has an interview with Slave Labor chief Dan Vado about selling comics online. SLG has quietly launched a site called Eyemelt.com that sells digital comics in PDF or CBZ format for $.69 or $.89. The site will be open for other publishers to sell their content at a price of their choosing. Vado doesn't say much about digital entertainment that hasn't already been learned the hard way by the music business, but it's good to hear from a comics publishers. A few good bits include:

DV I actually spent time and a little money looking at DRM systems. I almost settled on one and then read that it had been hacked by some kids in a daycare somewhere. I am of course kidding about the daycare kids, but DRM systems are a huge obstacle in the download environment. Steve Jobs recently went on record as saying he felt that record companies needed to drop their DRM requirements from the downloadable music business. He cited the fact tat the record companies were selling non-copy protected content in the form of CD's already and that the download sites should not have to be hampered by a limitation the record companies cannot put on their own products. Basically what it comes down to is if you put some kind of heavy handed DRM on your downloads you wind up making the download more expensive, making it less usable by the end user and ultimately end up sending that customer back to the torrent sites to get this stuff for free.

And ...

DV: We are going to be moving a lot of stuff that would have come out as comics onto our download site. The comic book format seems to be breathing its last and I think releasing a comic with sales under 1,000 copies not only is a money-loser for us, it doesn't do anything to build circulation. At 69¢ and with the notion of instant gratification, the barrier to trying something becomes reduced.

Again, the music biz and Steve Jobs figured this out a while ago, but digital offers so much potential benefit to smaller comics houses that it's encouraging to see a publisher with Slave Labor's reputation for quality jump modestly but convincingly into the market.