Green Hornet comics now available on iOS

Much like newspapers, the iPad is a great potential vehicle for comic books. Whether or not it has been good for the industry, and whether or not the industry has embraced it, is still debatable. I would hazard a guess that while many people may be enjoying comics on their iPads, the amount of people paying for that content may not be terribly high given the ease of piracy and the fact that publishers do not release the bulk titles digitally.

Like Chappy says, pricing is still an issue. Comic publishers are still charging close to newstand prices for items that have few of the benefits of physical copies. Basically at $2 an issue, you are saving 26 cents from buying a six issue collection off of Amazon (although you're saving $1.33/issue from the list price of the collected paperback).

In comparison the digital version:
can't be resold
can only be read on supported devices
can lose access at the whim of the vendor
can only be read when the publisher makes it available (usually some time after it's been available in paper format)

Is that worth a quarter per issue in savings? Maybe. Being able to read on my iPad vs. carrying a backpack full of trade paperbacks around is a huge bonus, but, digital or no, I still want to own the stuff I buy. That's probably far less of an issue with newspapers, so you would think that newspapers would be able to jump on this bandwagon with fewer hardships than comics, but I don't think it's a matter of "The comic industry has this licked, so why can't the newspaper industry?" I would say that the iPad seems like an ideal platform for both newspapers and comics, but neither has embraced it fully. Comics simply have the advantage that they're easily converted (iPad screen is pretty close to a comic book page) and that they have a large back stock of items that they are not currently making money, so they can release that digitally without canabalizing current print sales. As a result, the comic industry seems to have a better foothold in the iPad market, but to my mind, neither industry has embraced it or is doing a great job with it.

@Rob E. - great answer - thanks!