Buying Digital vs Physical; a Six Month Experiment

Justice League has constantly been a high selling comic digitally (DC Comics)

Since the DC relaunch last September, I have been partaking in an experiment.  I have been buying certain titles in digital form on the day of release.  I wanted to see what it was like to read only digital when I was accustomed to reading physical every week.  I started out only reading DC books, but slowly worked others into the mix.  I read the following titles digitally:

-Animal Man
-Batgirl
-Swamp Thing
-Wonder Woman
-Demon Knights
-Thief of Thieves
-Star Trek Ongoing
-Generation Hope
-Fatale
-X-Factor



I have also been reading a few titles a month late, to save a few dollars.

-Ultimate Comics X-Men
-Batman & Robin
-Detective Comics

After six months of doing this, I am starting to see the advantages of buying digitally, although I'm not 100% convinced.  For someone like me, buying digitally has the advantages of space.  Long boxes can take up a lot of room if you are a hardcore reader, and that will eventually create a bigger problem.  With digitally, I like being able to just buy and not worry about "how am I going to fit this into my long boxes" (wow that sounds dirty).  When my iPhone or Kindle Fire get low on space, I just delete a few.  On a side note, I have discovered a few books that I never thought I would start reading.  And while not all of them have been winners, it's still helps that I can just search certain things and find new comics that I will be interested in.  I discovered Atomic Robo this way.

Swamp Thing #7 (DC Comics)

What doesn't have me sold on the format though amounts to a few things.  As much as deleting a few comics to make space is easy and convenient, it's also a pain.  I like having all my comics ready and available to read.  It doesn't take long to download them again, but it's the principle of the thing.  But the thing that bothers me the most with buying digitally is not being about to see the art as well.  In a book like Swamp Thing, where the entire page is a beautiful work of art, it's harder to see the panel layouts.  The book is zoomed out when you are done reading the page, but it's just not the same.  When reading on the Kindle Fire, much of this complaint is lost, but the double page spreads aren't as clear as they would be in a physical copy.  Occasionally the comiXology program doesn't put the panels in the right order as well.

I'm not going to even get into the pricing, as I don't know enough about the royalties of the people creating the books.  A lot has been said on Twitter about how creators aren't receiving enough money either way.  Before I make a stance on it, I'll do more research.

Even though digital does have it's fall backs, I'll continue to read these books this way.  Sometimes I do wish I could make the transition over to physical again, but that would just be a waste of money.