The merging of Comixology and Kindle has created a hell I’d like to escape

In February of this year, Amazon finally completed its consumption of the once independent app for download comics, Comixology. The app was left untouched for nearly a decade after it was acquired by Amazon, and apart from removing the ability to buy comics directly from the app, it was still there. This year, Amazon changed things by incorporating Comixology's digital marketplace directly into the Kindle ecosystem and redesigning the Comixology app. Digital comics and digital books have been smashed together into an awful blob of content that is worse in every way. If you allow a company to acquire a near-monopoly in the digital books and comics space, it will do terrible things that will make the experience worse.

Comixology is the largest marketplace for digital comics for people who aren't big comic nerds. It is the only per-issue supplier of digital comics from a number of major publishers. If you want to avoid the issues of storing your physical collection, Comixology has always been a good alternative.

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So you want to start reading comics?

The United States has a defacto monopoly on the digital books space. Amazon's e-readers are the most popular in the US, followed by Barnes & Noble's Nook e-readers.

If you think the enormity of these marketplaces would make Comixology the best, you are mistaken. They succeeded because of their size, not their quality. Amazon can use its size to push publishers or ignore them. Despite an uproar from independent booksellers, Amazon shipped numerous copies of the sequel to Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale a week in advance. When apologizing for the broken embargo, Penguin Random House didn't mention Amazon.

I tried to cut back on using Amazon's services because of its role in digital publishing. It took me a while to notice that Amazon had completed its integration of Comixology. I have started to notice lately.

The new Comixology app is not very useful. That is the best word for it. The design isn't really intuitive and it can make a large collection of comics difficult to navigate. It feels like when you go to the grocery store, they move the aisles. The change feels so dramatic after years of familiarity.

Comixology has not been labeled the same as my local Food Bazaar. There are no clear labels for useful built-in tools like itsGuided View, which is designed to fluidly move you from panel to panel with a swipe instead of having each page take up the whole display. The Guided View is still there, but it's not clear what it is or how to use it. I only know that you can access it by double-tapping, because I was trying to get to the menu to leave the book.

The integration with the larger Amazon store is the real pain of the new Comixology experience. Amazon has always been a challenge to navigate. There are fake products, sponsored ads, and sometimes even fake products in sponsored ads. When I ordered the new Poison Ivy series, about the DC villainess, I was met with salves used to treat poison ivy rash.

wanted to preorder the new poison ivy comic and was instead violently reminded of comixology being ruined by Amazon (the comic I wanted is the third actual book down) pic.twitter.com/4tFemED9YP

— (@alexhcranz) May 11, 2022

They fixed that search result in three weeks. The new book is the top result. The salves arrive. The rest of the Poison Ivy-focused books are hidden until you scroll past the sponsored junk you probably weren't looking for.

Spider-Man, Captain America, and Batman are just some of the popular heroes who return toy results.

Comixology searches used to return comic results.

The search results were not great before the merger. There are a million variations on the Spider-Man title. If you're looking for issue 10 of a specific Spider-Man run, you're probably going to find a lot of results unless you add more to your query. Before the merger, you weren't avoiding results for Amazon Prime TV shows, toys, salves and anything else Amazon thinks a searcher of Spider-Man comics might want to buy.

At every turn, you are reminded that you are in Amazon's house and you will consider more than just the one thing you wanted to buy. It is obtrusive and unpleasant. For months, I have griped about it with friends and read about it while nodding in agreement and generally accepted the unpleasantness.

I wanted to read a book in the app. I hadn't used it in a while, but I knew I wanted to read it, and I knew I owned it. I was met with the plethora of comics I have acquired over a decade of using the Comixology store.

There's no way to keep the comics out of my app. They are always right there. The first thing I have seen if I haven't purchased a book in a week. It's annoying on my iPad Mini. It is offensive on my tablets.

It doesn't have to be that way. One of the largest and wealthiest companies in the world is Amazon. Front-end user interface designers have money to spare. This could be solved quickly. I don't think Amazon has any inclination to do that. Amazon is content to maintain its ebook business, not be a good leader or good steward. The bonehead design choices that came after merging its digital comics and ebook stores have me feeling this way.

The entire lineup of e-readers, including the ones from the Kindle, feels outdated next to the ones from the other companies. Those who use the latest E-Ink displays have fancy abilities like faster refresh rates for web browsing and stylus input. The cheapest e-readers in the lineup are the ones that work with Amazon's store.

Amazon has left its main book-recommending app, Goodreads, to wallow. The app has not had aUI refresh since it was acquired by Amazon. It looks a lot like it did when it launched. Other apps, like Facebook, have grown powerful because of their huge amount of data that they use to develop their own predictions of what you want to watch or read. It's recommended by Goodreads that whatever is popular widely and in a genre vaguely adjacent.

Amazon could do a lot better, from the store to the recommendation service. It's as if Amazon likes how little effort it has to exert over its monopoly. David Steinberger left Comixology to lead a new Amazon-wide initiative that was too good an opportunity to not take. It seems like Amazon rewarded incompetence with a promotion. I would be more annoyed, but I'm still trying to find the book I wanted to read.