Micah Baldwin, CEO and co-founder of Graphic.ly, has been talking to CBR about his efforts to reach out to the rest of the digital comics business community (notably Comixology and Panelfly who are name checked) and start discussions on an open standard for digital comics that would allow a comic bought on one platform to be read on any other.

Vendor lock-in is one of my big objections to digital comics, and one of the things that I think the print medium still has over its virtual cousin. For me, one of the great joys of reading comic books is sharing comic books. It’s a simple idea – you like a book, you recommend it to a friend, and you loan them your copy.Maybe they really like it, maybe they love it. Maybe you say “Hey, no problem. Why don’t you keep it?”.

There was a time when this was possible. There was a time when buying something meant that you owned it, rather than owning a license to it. If I buy a comic and I don’t like it, I can give it to a friend, sell it on eBay, or drop it off at the charity shop. With a digital comic book, what is bought is bought and there is no going back. There are, quite literally no swapsies, and definitely no sharing.

This is because, in the digital world, “Sharing” is bad. “Sharing”, in fact, has become practically synonymous with stealing. “File Sharers” are pirates, and pirates fund organised crime and drug trafficking. I don’t know how my mix tapes I made by recording songs from the radio funded organsied crime exactly, but I am assured they did and I can apologise in retrospect. I was young, please forgive me.

Now, please, can we have a system that still lets me share my comics with my friends? Because Digital comics may be convenient, they may be cheap, but when we live in such a digitised world that simply exchanging items with another human being feels almost alien, almost taboo in some way, is that a price worth paying? Do you want to buy comics, or do you want to hold a perpetual rental license to some? I know what I want.

That is why I love the simplicity and purity of Micah’s idea; that a comic once bought should be transferrable between platforms. It seems so obvious, doesn’t it? As obvious, at least to me, as being able to pick up a print comic and walk to another room. And yet, I fear it is an idea doomed to failure.

When a number of IT industry players tried to agree an open standard for word processing documents, Microsoft went their own way. As the vendors of the most widely used word processing software, Microsoft knew that the best way to defend their monopoly was to ensure that documents written in their software, stayed in their software. Whilst their “new” file formats were open, they were different. Different enough to ensure that people played safe, and stuck with what they knew.

Spin the time-dial forward a few years and we have the advent of the iPod. Slick, polished, oh so cool and emphatically desireable, I doubt many consumers understood, or cared, about the DRM laden prioprietary file format that lurked under the iPod’s polished veneer. Like a pretty new girlfriend with some deep seated issues, you weren’t going to find out until you had the packaging off and you were far … too … committed.

To the present day and comics, more broadly eBooks, are the new battleground. With multiple hardware and software platforms jostling for position, it is a difficult and daunting task to select the right platform for your purchases. It is an important choice – Quite aside from the investment in the hardware, all of your purchases are going to permanently and inextricably tied to that device forever more.When you read, how you read, all tied to that device. And in case I haven’t made the point firmly enough yet, I’d like to remind you of one certainty, “Lynch’s Law of Stuff”, at this point.

Stuff breaks.

If Micah and the team at Graphic.ly can catch the ear of this burgeoning industry though, we have a fighting chance. We have an opportunity to keep our community, to still share, without destroying the economic viability of the digital comics market and without funding organsied crime any more than any of us are already.

Step One is a format that all of the readers can utilise. A format that is well documented and does not use any proprietary software or standards that require licenses. This will open the doors to more developers, and take things forward. If you doubt that, just take a look at any other technology that has opened itself up to innovators and developers, then come back to this article. You’ll be ready for Step Two.

Step Two is to create a system that allows us to move the comics between devices. Purely as a thought experiment, I imagined a sort of “central registry” for comics, a shared and open online system where your purchases are registered along with a secure and traceable but ultimately anonymous account. You register each of your devices to this central repository and each one that is registered can then download and read your purchased comics. For those concerned that people would register too many devices to a single account, limits could be placed on the total number of devices or the number of devices of a given type (e.g. you can have one mobile, one tablet, one laptop, one desktop). The comics reside on the devices temporarily, getting around the storage limitations of smaller devices and ensuring that the central repository is the “master copy” of your comics collection (remeber, Stuff Breaks)

If you want to share a comic, you “loan it” to your friend, using their account details. It stops working on your devices, starts working on theirs. As everything is tied to the central repository, they simply download their copy from there. When they are done with it, they send it back to you. It stops working for them, it starts working for you. If you want to sell a comic to someone, you “transfer” the comic on a permanent basis. If the central registry had some simple eCommerce facilities built in, you could even send and receive money through it. A small percentage, perhaps, would be taken by the registry to cover its running costs.

This isn’t science fiction, it doesn’t even mildly push the boundaries of what is technically possible with the very devices that you are using to read this article. A simple, self sustaining comics eco system. A comic shop for the 21st century, a level publishing playing field, and the freedom to move between platforms without fear of losing (or having to re-buy) your favourite comics.

It sounds simple … doesn’t it? I hope Micah’s call doesn’t fall on deaf ears.