Effects of piracy on the American comic book market and the role of digital formats

Wojciech Hardy

No 01/2020, IBS Working Papers from Instytut Badan Strukturalnych

Abstract: Much like the music and movie industries before, the comic book industry has entered the digital markets and faces the unfair competition of unauthorized sources. I conduct a survey among comic book readers to infer whether the unpaid channels harm the sales of comic books from the top American publishers. My data allows me to construct a time panel of comics readers and calculate the substitution rate between the paid and unpaid channels of comics acquisition. Moreover, I show that the digital comics – both paid and unpaid – are typically considered as inferior by the readers. With the price of digitally released new comics set at the same level as their print versions, this suggests that readers who do not want to pay the full price for print copies are more likely to use pirate sources than to switch to legal digital channels. Indeed, among the surveyed sample, lowering the price of digital comics could help convert some of the unpaid acquisitions into paid digital ones.

Keywords: comic books; media; digital formats; piracy; file-sharing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C83 K42 O34 Z11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2020-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-cul, nep-gen, nep-ind, nep-ipr, nep-law and nep-pay
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