Graphic Novels And Technology

BitTorrent: the Comic Book Shop of the Future?

The file-sharing firm best known for making piracy possible is now doing deals not only with film and TV companies but with graphic novel publishers too

James Bridle | April 19, 2015

BitTorrent is a much-cited and much-maligned format. Most people associate it with piracy, because, to be completely honest, that is mostly what it is used for. But practically it’s just a way of moving bits around – and it’s particularly useful for moving big bits around, stuff that takes a while to download. This is because BitTorrent works by breaking everything down into lots of chunks and passing them around, so you can download a few chunks at a time, from a network of other BitTorrent users. That’s why it’s so popular for downloading movies: but if you’re a publisher with a lot of bits to move, it makes sense for you too. BitTorrent, Inc, for its part, has been trying to go legit, doing deals with movie studios and the like to make films available legally – and it has started to do the same for big books too.

McCloud, Understanding Comics. Source: https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/graphic-novel/

<more at http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/19/bittorrent-bundle-graphic-novels-comics-file-sharing; related links: http://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2015/nov/30/how-to-teach-graphic-novels (How to teach ... graphic novels
It’s not all KAPOW! and THWACK! – graphic novels are a great way to inspire students of all ages and abilities about English literature and language. November 20, 2015) and http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/8/3/000185/000185.html (Computers, Comics and Cult Status: A Forensics of Digital Graphic Novels. 2014, Volume 8, Number 3. Jaime Lee Kirtz. [Abstract: The digital era has become inundated with the idea of anonymity as on the Internet where users create avatars in forums and write without obvious material constraint; however when considering documents such as graphic novels and print fiction, the figure of the author remains a nostalgic figure which grants validity to the document. In classic comic book collections such as Watchmen and Batman: Year One by Alan Moore and Frank Miller, the original scripts by the authors are included in special editions in both print and Kindle format. But these "original" script pages are shrouded in forms of anonymity as they illustrate signs of digitization, either through scanning or during production and thus display various visual clues, such as errors, which relay levels of realness. Furthermore online versions of these script pages, found on fan website databases and authors’ blogs, are complicated by the anonymity the Internet and digital editions produce. Therefore a digital forensics methodology is used to interrogate these script pages in both print and digital format to create an ordering system for digitally manipulated text. It also endeavours to illustrate the possibilities for a forming digital forensics field by using various technical calculations and recreations of text with original software and hardware.])>