Longbox Digital Profile

Name:

Longbox Digital

Started by:

Rantz Hosely

COO:

David Turner

Publishers With Longbox:

Top Cow
Boom!
NBM
Shadowline
Dabel Brothers
Archaia

Cost:

Longbox is slated to have a $.99 per comic download fee.

Contact Info:

Information - info@longboxdigital.com
Publishers and Creators - content@longboxdigital.com
Advertising - sales@longboxdigital.com

Website:

www.longboxinc.com

Submissions:

Longbox is doing creator owned downloads with the likes of Richard Starkings, Johnathan Hickman, Ivan Brandon, Jamie McKelvie, and Kieron Gillen. Creators can get their work submitted to Longbox Digital by emailing content@longboxdigital.com.

Features:

The software has many different features including:

• Eight free comics a month for registered users that would rotate out.
• Support for current digital file formats such as .cbr and cbz.
• High quality and high resolution pictures.
• The ability for users to have other accounts for their children with rating systems that would block inappropriate content.
• Blocking unread pages so as to stop a reader from spoiling the story for themselves.
• An easy navigation system similar to iTunes.
• Many different reading and viewing formats.
• Cross platform usage - PC, Mac, Etc.

History:

Longbox Digital is the brainchild of Rantz Hosely, a creator himself, and editor of Tori Amos' Comic Book Tattoo. In 2006 Hoseley saw a big future for a digital comics platform and sought to unite publishers into a storefront similar to iTunes from Apple. The iTunes model has a huge selection of songs that users can download for a small fee and use them on many different devices to enjoy. Hosely used that as a basis for the kind of storefront needed for digital comics to flourish.

Longbox Digital is an application that will be able to be used across many different platforms, be it PC, Mac, Kindle, iPhone, or PSP. It will allow users to download comics, read them on their application of choice, and support other digital comic formats, all from an easy to use software platform. The price point mimics iTunes as well at a suggested price of .99 cents per comic, although some may be lower.

At the start of this quest, Hosely saw a lot of resistance from publishers, who felt that the digital market was just going to leech away profits from their business model. This sent Hoseley into developing and researching a solid, secure, and easy to use software that would change the way businesses use digital comics. One thing Hoseley focused on was to find a way to make the transition for publishers an easy one that would allow them to easily convert their files into a secure format at the click of a button, similar to the software that allows you to generate pdf's through a print menu. One click and it's done. This would make it a seamless aspect of the publishing process and incur little to no overhead for publishers.

Publishers and creators would also be able to create audio files for comics, creating commentary tracks similar to that found on DVD's. This would give fans unparalleled access to the creative process that writers and artists employ when making a comic. Video and hyperlinks would also be able to be embedded in the digital comic, making it a very unique product and giving it something that would set it apart from its print cousin.

Flash forward to 2009 and Hosely and Co. have unveiled a beta of the software platform. They have partnered with CBR, a highly popular comics news site, to give news feeds to the software. They have also gained many different publishers and independent creators to offer their products online. This will give creators and publishers one more revenue stream that will enable them to profit from their creations. Publishers will also be able to tailor their products to fit their needs with price points, vouchers for real comics, and the ability to add audio and video as mentioned above.

Longbox was set to launch in the fall of 2009, but as of December 2009, it has not been seen yet.