Comixology was once heralded as the place to purchase digital comic books, thanks to its worthwhile discovery, awesome sales, and easy navigability for perusing decades of books from a large assortment of publishers. While Amazon bought the company back in 2013, it wasn't until 2022 that Amazon started tossing its weight around, completely replacing the user experience on the web and app with something much closer to the Kindle interface, and it was nowhere near ready. This rushed and poorly thought-out move left the Comixology team scrambling to fix all the things Amazon broke with the switch, and now Amazon is laying many of them off.

In the great wave of 2023 layoffs happening right now, on the Amazon side of things the Comixology crew is getting hit hard, with many questions left unanswered about what will ultimately happen with the service. As it stands, it's looking more and more like Amazon has killed the digital comic industry in one move, and now it's doubling down with layoffs instead of making things right with its customers.

The comic book news site Bleeding Cool recently reported about a series of Facebook posts and tweets from Comixology employees discussing the current layoffs at the company. You can read the Technical Account Manager's post above, which mentions he's now part of a skeleton crew, one of the few left at Comixolgy, which is not something that's good to hear about a service that in the last year ruined the libraries of its users, decimating book discovery while also eradicating any chance of convenient checkouts or lucrative sales. Basically, everything that made Comixology great was wiped out when Amazon moved to the 4.0 release based on its own Kindle app. This includes the web experience, as the store was moved to Amazon.com, which is missing an incredible amount of features that more than likely are now gone forever despite promises things will be fixed. Well, how will that happen if there's only a skeleton crew running the service?

For one, it's heartbreaking to see Comixology staff pay the price for Amazon's mistake. Anyone that reads comics could have told you the Kindle app/site isn't even close to good enough to browse, buy, and read comic books, yet Amazon wanted to cut costs by moving to a single codebase at the expense of the entire userbase (and now the staff), and very little has been done since the switch to fix things. Sure, guided view on the web was recently fixed, but there are still so many problems that it's hard to see how the new app and store will ever receive the features needed to browse decades upon decades of books with incredibly similar names and number counts.

The old Comixology app and store had this down to a science, with all the features needed to sort the books by author, date, publisher, event, and anything else you could think of. This is no longer the case and doesn't look to be changing anytime soon, making it challenging to find back issues from years and years ago on Amazon.com. Plus, even if I wanted to buy the books, I can't do it in the app on Android or iOS, as Amazon removed the ability to purchase anything in the apps so that it doesn't have to give Apple and Google 30% of the sale — yet more customer-first thinking from Amazon.

In my case, I built up a large collection of manga on Comixology over the last ten years simply because it was the only store selling HD copies of the books I wanted to read. As it stands, many of my books are not HD anymore; thus, I no longer have access to the very things I purchased, but lesser copies that look awful on high-end tablets. Amazon basically replaced many of the comics in my collection with low-res books I specifically went out of my way to avoid, and I'm not the only one; this was service-wide, where many books also display incorrectly while also reverting to low-res imagery. And while I'm fully aware digital licenses aren't the same as physical ownership, the point remains Amazon has damaged thousands of dollars of my purchased books with no consideration for me or any other reader hit by the same bullshit. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, but it's easily the most egregious.

Still, this is the perfect example of why the digital libraries we've all built up over the last decade across a host of services are incredibly anti-consumer, as the terms and quality can change at any point, and the only ones left holding the bag are us, the consumers who were dumb enough to trust multinational corporations like Amazon. Worst of all, the people at Comixology didn't deserve this, yet, they, too, are paying the price as many lose their jobs in a current wave of layoffs that will continue through the year.

In the end, the only winner is Amazon, as it's still unknown how this will affect the digital comic book industry at large, seeing that Comixology is one of the few places left to buy comic books and manga from an assortment of publishers.

Sure, Marvel has a subscription app as well as a standalone storefront that's still based on Comixology's old app (thank god), and even DC has its own subscription app, but what about the indies, where will they go if Comixolgy collapses? And it's not like digital manga is in a good place either, seeing that many of the legitimate apps like Viz primarily offer low-res books. While I doubt Amazon will be leaving the e-book industry anytime soon, Amazon has already illustrated quite clearly that it can't be trusted with our digital comic purchases.

I, for one, will never buy a digital comic book from Amazon ever again, which is a shame as the new Kindle Scribe is perfect for reading manga. Too bad most of my books are hidden on that device, another of the many issues with Amazon's merger with Comixology.