The merger of Comixology and Kindle has created a hell I would like to escape

In February this year, Amazon finally ended its consumption of the once independent app for downloading comics, Comixology. Amazon had acquired the app way back in 2013, and apart from removing the option to purchase comics directly from the app, it left it untouched for almost a decade. But this year, Amazon changed things – by incorporating Comixology’s digital marketplace directly into the Kindle ecosystem and totally redesigning the Comixology app. It has taken two separate media – digital comics and digital books – and smashed them together into an unholy blob of content that is worse in every way. Apparently, if you let one company acquire an almost monopoly in the digital books and comics, it will do terrible things that make the experience worse.

For those of you who are not big comic book nerds, Comixology is the largest marketplace for digital comics. If you do not want to pay for individual monthly subscriptions to publishers, it is the only provider of digital comics from a number of major publishers, including DC Comics and Image. If you read comics and want to avoid the hassle of storing your physical collection, Comixology has until recently always provided a fairly solid collection option.

The Kindle, meanwhile, has maintained a de facto monopoly on digital books in the United States. Amazon’s e-readers are the most bought in the United States, with Rakuten’s Kobo series of e-readers (Rakuten is the largest bookstore in Japan) and Barnes & Noble’s line of Nook e-readers behind.

If you think the sheer scale of these marketplaces would mean that Kindle or Comixology were the best, you would be seriously mistaken. They are successful solely because of their size – not their quality. Amazon is so large that it can regularly use its size to pressure publishers or ignore them. In 2019, Amazon sent several copies of the sequel to Margaret Atwoods Maid’s Tale a week in advance, and despite a tumult from independent bookstores, it had no problems with the publisher Penguin Random House. Penguin Random House did not even mention Amazon when apologizing to readers and booksellers for the broken embargo.

Amazon’s increasingly external role in digital publishing had led me to try to cut back on the use of its services. So when Amazon completed its integration of Comixology in February, it took me a while to notice. But oh boy, I’m starting to notice it lately.

The new Comixology app is pretty much just … annoying. That’s the best word for it. Everything you need is still there, but the design is not really intuitive and it can make a large collection of comics (I’ve been using Comixology since 2011) hard to navigate. It feels a bit like going to the grocery store, after they move the aisles around. Everything is still there, but the change feels so dramatic after years of the familiar.

But where my local Food Bazaar will helpfully mark the times, Comixology has not. There are no clear labels for useful built-in tools like its “Guided View”, which is designed to move you floating from panel to panel with a swipe instead of letting each page fill the entire screen. The guided tour is still there, but the clear explanation of what it is or how to use it is gone. You can access it by double-clicking – which I only know because I was trying to access the menu to exit the book.

Still, the real pain of the new Comixology experience is its store integration with the larger Amazon store. Amazon has always been a struggle to navigate. There are the fake products, the sponsored ads and sometimes even fake products in sponsored ads. When I went to pre-order the new one Ivy series, about the DC villain, earlier this month, I was instead greeted with ointments used to treat poison rashes.

Over the past three weeks, they have corrected the search result. The new book is now the top result. The ointments come afterwards. The rest of the Poison Ivy-focused books DC has published over the years are now “below the dividing line,” hidden until you roll past the sponsored junk that you probably weren’t looking for.

Other popular heroes, such as Spider-Man, Captain America and Batman, return toy results right next to the comics.

Comixology searches are used to just return comic results.

And lo and behold, these search results were not exactly good before the merger. There must be a million variations of the Spider-Man title. If you’re looking for version 10 of a very specific Spider-Man run, you’ll probably review a lot of results unless you add more to your query. But before the Amazon merger, you also did not avoid results for Amazon Prime TV shows, toys, ointments, and anything else that Amazon thinks a searcher for Spider-Man comics might want to buy.

When you use the service now, you will be painfully reminded that you are in the house of Amazon and you will consider more than just the one thing you would buy. It is intrusive and uncomfortable. And for several months I have been grabbing out of it with friends and reading about it while nodding in agreement and generally accepting the discomfort.

But last week I wanted to read a book in the Kindle app. I had not used it for a while, preferred Libby when I can, but I knew I owned this book and I knew I would read it. Only instead of being greeted with the myriad of books I have acquired over the course of a decade using the Amazon Kindle Store, was I greeted with the myriad of comics I have acquired over the course of a decade using Comixology -the store.

There’s no way to filter the comics out of my Kindle app. They are always right there. The first thing I have seen if I have not bought a book in that week. It’s annoying on my iPad Mini. It’s directly offensive on my Android E-Ink tablet and Kindle Oasis.

That does not have to be the case either. Amazon is one of the largest and richest companies in the world. It has money left over for front-end user interface designers. It could fix this quickly. But I do not think Amazon has any inclination to do so. For the most part, Amazon is content to maintain its e-book business, not be actual managers or good managers. And it’s not just the bony-haired design choices that came after the merger of its digital comics and e-book stores that make me feel that way.

The Kindle series of e-readers now feels painfully outdated next to something like Kobo Elipsa and Sage or basically the entire Onyx Boox series. These use the latest E-Ink screens and include smart features like faster refresh rates for web browsing and stylus input. The most important thing for the Kindle series is that the e-readers are relatively inexpensive and work with the Amazon store.

Amazon has also let its most important book-recommending app, Goodreads, topple over. The app does not appear to have had a UI update since Amazon purchased it in 2013. In fact, it’s very similar to when it’s launched in 2007. Other apps, such as Netflix, Facebook and Google, have become strong due to their huge amount data to develop algorithms that try to predict what you want to read or see before doing so. Goodreads just recommends what is popular broadly and in a genre that vaguely adjoins each other.

From the store to the recommendation service for the Kindle hardware, Amazon could do much better. Still, it’s as if Amazon actually likes how little effort it has to put over its huge monopoly to continue raising dollars. Earlier this year, Comixology CEO David Steinberger left to “lead a new Amazon-wide initiative that is too good an opportunity not to take.” In a Twitter thread, he assured that he would be at Comixology in an advisory role. From the outside, it certainly looks like Amazon went and rewarded incompetence with a promotion. I would be more annoyed, but I’m still trying to find the book I would like to read on my Kindle.