Game Stooge

The Hidden Sony Console Feature

• Scribbled on January 3rd, 2010 by Jordan Lund
• Filed in Firmware, Industry News, PlayStation Network, Sony PSP, Sony PlayStation 3

With all the firmware updates for the PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation Portable and concerns over bricking systems, it’s easy to fall behind and not have your system be up to date.

Late in 2009, Sony partnered with Disney, Marvel and other publishers to sell digital versions of comic books online through the Playstation Network store on the PSP. You can browse the selection from your PC here. Now, amateur comic book scanners have been around for years, distributing their works through, ahem, less than legitimate means. This is the first time though that publishers have banded together to sell comic books online in a legitimate digital format.

At around $2.00 a pop, the digital versions are actually less expensive than the print versions in most cases, although the selection seems limited mostly to back catalog titles at this time. They’re downloaded in a proprietary *.MNB format and the file size varies greatly, the largest being around 45 to 50 MB.

There are a couple of different options for reading books, pressing left and right on the D-pad uses an “AutoFlow” feature which jumps from word bubble to word bubble automatically. Alternatively you can use up and down on the D-pad to change pages, the left and right triggers to zoom in and out and the analog nub to move around the pages. In addition to the reading options, there’s also a built in music player allowing you to listen to your own music tracks while reading if that’s your thing.

Really, there seems to be just a few things holding the service back:

• The process is less than transparent. You have to update to firmware 6.20 which means having a fully charged battery first (even if you’re connected to wall power), then you have to click on the Digital Comics app which didn’t actually install with the firmware, it’s a separate download and install. Then you can’t actually buy comics through the app, you have to buy them through the PSN store and read them through the app. You can’t also just buy a book. You have to fund your PSN account with a minimum of $5. So if all you want is that $1.99 copy of Captain America #25 then you might as well pick out 2 other books as well and fund your wallet with $6.
• A lack of bundles. I’d love to have every issue of Amazing Spider-Man on tap, but I’m not going to go through 600 issues and add them to a shopping cart one at a time. Give me the option of buying a bundle of issues all in one shot… gee, kind of like those new-fangled “Graphic Novels” that people have been all excited about for, oh, the last 25 years or so.
• Subscription services. Having the back catalog is nice and all, but a successful service is going to be built on repeat revenue. Just like a comic book store, I should be able to subscribe to the comics I want and new issues are downloaded automatically every Wednesday.
• New Content. I stopped buying comics during the whole Civil War thing at Marvel and the 52 thing at D.C. The whole scheme just seemed like a corporate money grab rather than good storytelling. So what do I see in the digital store? Civil War. House of M. All the stuff that made me stop buying comics in the first place. The most recent books on the service are all over a year old.

Show me what I’m missing and deliver NEW content.

All of this may end up being for naught anyway if the rumor mill has anything to say about it. Apple has reportedly invested in a large quantity of 10″ iPod style touch-screens. They’ve also rented a hall in San Francisco for some big announcement on Janaury 26th.

Naturally, if Apple were to come out with a device similar to an ebook reader powered by the iTunes store, it would steamroll any store set up by Sony, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. People will simply take their illegitimate bootleg comics, convert them to PDFs and load them on the new device.