We here at Multiversity love our libraries. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to read nearly as many comics as we otherwise could. Or at least I wouldn’t. (Full disclosure: I also work at a library.) Clearly we’re not the only ones, as the digital library service Libby (the app for OverDrive) reached out to us to discuss the meteoric rise in digital comic readership via their app and subsequently libraries. Thanks to Libby for the opportunity and thanks to Kenny, Libby’s comic book expert, for answering all my questions!
Let’s start with some some framing for what Libby is, and then specifically how Libby handles comics and manga. Libby is a service used by libraries to get digital materials to their patrons. From your end, what else do you think people should know about about Libby?
Kenny Cruse: Well, you kind of summed it up pretty good. Libby is basically the app that we developed for libraries to be able to offer digital content to their patrons, whether those are audiobooks, ebooks, magazines, or comic books and manga. Libraries can also use it to foster a sense of community – everything on there can be completely edited and tailored to their specific communities. We’ve seen libraries use Libby to host book clubs or run campaigns; a bunch of really cool creative things that they can do with it. So it’s not only a place where one can read stuff but also it’s a great way for the library to keep in contact with their community.
So it’s less subscription, more purchase by item, correct?
KC: For the libraries, yes. It’s free completely for the end users with library cards.
The libraries use their funding that they would use otherwise on physical books to purchase a host of different things and they all come in different lending models and different kinds of prices that are all set by the publisher. We don’t handle any of that stuff. They just give us what they what they want to sell it for and we sell it.
What’s the most common lending term? Is it forever based? Is it per circ?
KC: There are three really big ones. One is “one copy, one user” which emulates checking out a physical book from the library. They purchase one electronic copy of a book, they have that one copy that can be checked out by one person at a time and then once they’re finished with it, they can return it. Lending periods for that are determined by the library, so they can say seven days, 21 days, whatever they want to do.
Second one is metered access. There’s a few different kinds of that but the short version is metered access is kind of exactly what it says on the tin. There’s a specific lending period where the library can have it in their inventory for a specific amount of time or a specific amount of checkouts. After that has lapsed, the title is removed from their inventory and they have to repurchase it. We see that mostly on large, best selling books and stuff that just came out.
And then cost per circs (CPC) is the other one, where the titles aren’t actually owned by the library but they can set them up for lending by their patrons. Every time a patron checks one out, they get charged a specific amount from their account.
Is it different in terms of the percentages of which of those three models show up for comics publishers versus non comics publishers?
KC: It’s pretty consistent across the board. I would say that probably comics publishers more heavily use the metered access plan. There’s a lot of smaller comic book publishers that still use one copy, one user and then it’s a mixed bag on whether or not content’s available in CPC. It really depends on publisher and it really depends on the title. Sometimes they’ll be like half of a catalogue or something like that as CPC.
Interesting. Why wouldn’t they make the whole thing one or the other?
KC: It’s backlist. Most of the time they use backlist stuff for CPC to generate more interest, and then they get libraries purchasing the newer content and the more best selling content through either metered access or one copy one user. It’s really up to the publisher.
Continued belowI know that a lot of comics publishers have or are starting to have more deals with the traditional book publishers. Are they the ones that are coming to Libby or is it through, like, DC/Marvel instead of Penguin Random House or Simon & Schuster?
KC: I’m not actually super knowledgeable about the specifics of the business agreements but I know that there’s a bunch of publishers that do get distributed by larger entities. So we receive Dark Horse manga and comic books through our Penguin Random House feed. Whether or not they actually set those prices themselves, I don’t really know. I assume that Dark Horse sets their own prices.
But it’s coming to you through Penguin Random House instead of directly from Dark Horse?
KC: Right. But we do have direct relationships with a lot of publishers as well – DC and Marvel are the big ones; Image Comics comes to us directly. So it’s really just depending on what kind of business arrangements those publishers have. I don’t think Dark Horse is owned by Penguin Random House, but it’s just easier for them to distribute through that feed as well.
I think they have a deal for the book market & Digital Distribution. Does Libby have, I don’t know if they have this or not, but do they have plans for putting comics in the magazine section? Right now, I know a lot of what’s on the platform are the trades or the manga volumes. But are they looking into potentially having subscriptions to “Batman” or “Spider-man?”
KC: I don’t think that that will ever happen, at least not in the way that you’re describing. Because, well, magazine is a very specific format at OverDrive [the company behind Libby.] Our back end system sees them completely differently. Comic books and manga and stuff like that, those are just standard ebooks but magazines have a whole host of other weirdness going on with the format that I don’t think can be emulated. Well, it’s not really about emulation; it’s more just we’re treating them different because the magazines have different functionality. Like they have the article view and the one tap checkouts and stuff like that.
Let’s shift more towards the contents. OverDrive had reached out to talk about the increase in comics and graphic novel and manga circulation in the last couple of years. What sort of trends have you started to see in the last six months, maybe in the last two years since the pandemic kind of reshaped a lot of reading habits?
KC: Well, I can say definitively that the pandemic was good for comics. We definitely saw an increase in checkouts of comic books and manga during the course of the lockdown and first couple years of the pandemic. I actually put together a presentation recently where I looked at overall sales, not just from OverDrive but in the comic book industry and it went up like 66% from 2021 to 2022 just because of the pandemic sales. Then it evened out, like they had 1% growth over 2022 and 2023.
There was a lot of drive from not only Marvel wrapping up a lot of its long term movie plans and figuring out where they’re gonna go next with that driving popularity of comic books but also a host of other page-to-screen adaptations of smaller, creator-owned stuff like “Paper Girls” that came out on Amazon. We saw a spike in checkouts with that title when Paper Girls was released. It’s a host of factors. But yes, comic books and manga have been increasingly more and more popular.
Were there any surprises? Like any titles you’re like, “Oh, wow. I didn’t expect that to get as big as it did.”
KC: I don’t know if it’s a surprise but I think it’s really interesting that the top selling graphic novel that we own right now is “Miles Morales.” His solo run, not the original Brian Michael Bendis one but the one that I think came out in like 2018. If you exclude juvenile comic books-
We can talk about those, haha. Because they are huge.
KC: Yeah. But if you exclude juvenile comics, and thinking more strictly about traditional comic books, “Miles Morales” and Marvel are knocking going out of the park.
Continued belowSo you’ve got “Dog Man,” you’ve got all the Raina Telgemeier stuff, and then you’ve got “Miles Morales.”
KC: Yep, exactly. Exactly. That’s pretty much what it looks like when we sort everything. It’s like anything Dav Pilkey, Jeff Kinney, Raina Telgemeier, and then traditional comics are on page three or four.
That’s a little sad but do you think this is the groundswell of all the kids are now into these series, and they’re going to start moving to other stuff? Or is it going to stay pretty fractured?
KC: I think that comics is very unique in that it organizes itself into reading grades, essentially. I think the popularity of juvenile comics are not only because it’s a bunch of authors and creators kind of jumping on a, I don’t want to say a bandwagon, but you know, they could see that comic books are doing really, really well so they want to make a comic book and get into that market.
It will lead into more graphic novels, like them reading more higher level graphic novels. Maybe getting into traditional, superhero comic books, or maybe creator-owned stuff or maybe even some of the nonfiction, autobiographical stuff that we offer as well.
Do you see a rise in one genre over another within this? Not by format, like manga and comics versus like, graphic novels, but sci-fi, fantasy, horror, slice of life? Are there any trends that have been standing out?
KC: I will say that we’ve seen a decrease in interest in superhero stuff. I think that’s mostly superhero burnout. I mean, they’re everywhere now. But anything that is telling a specific story from a specific viewpoint – we call them diverse voices, when we create those kinds of lists – but you know, anybody that’s telling their their truth, either LGBTQ stuff, or African American experience, Jewish experience, anything African diaspora, anything Asian diaspora, anything that is telling a story that has a unique viewpoint. That’s been very, very popular.
Has Libby been adding significant amounts of publishers’ back catalogs in the last few years? Or do you already have it and it’s mostly up to the libraries at this point to be uptaking it, to be building their collections with whatever limited resources there are?
KC: It’s mostly the second one. Before I took this position here, I worked on our content acquisition team and one of my specialties when I was on that team was also comic books and I made sure to try and get as much backlist content as we could just to have the collection. We’re basically building the world’s largest library. We want to have everything here so that people can use it if they need to. And then we do a lot of marketing and merchandising to try and get backlist content to circulate a little bit better. But really it is on the libraries to purchase the content and merchandise it in a way that their patrons want to check it out.
Earlier you were talking about sales versus circ. When Libby looks at the metrics, are they looking primarily at sales of comic books to libraries or circulations of those sold comic books? Do you have that data? Or is that library by library?
KC: It varies library by library but we do keep track of that kind of data. One of the things that we’re seeing too is one very important factor for librarians is…they call it cost per circulation, which I understand is confusing because we have a lending model like that, but it’s more about how much money they get out of something versus how many times it circulates. One of the things that we’ve seen with comic books is that the value of comic books has been going up, up, up, and up because they purchased one or two comic books and it circulates like crazy so they really actually get their money’s worth out of it.
It’s a really good way, if libraries have got a couple extra bucks and they really just want to drive library engagement, comic books are really good way to go because even if they spend just a little bit of money, they always circulate really, really well.
Continued belowSo I’m a librarian and that’s why I’m asking a lot of these technical questions because they really interest me. I’ve noticed that series can be hit or miss in terms of the metadata, or the organization in the Libby app. Sometimes I’ll search for something and it’ll pop up and then it won’t show up in the series list. But then I see it in the search list. I’m wondering, why do you think that? Is that you’re being given the incorrect data by the publishers? Is it on Libby’s end? And is it on the library catalogs? And is it some unholy combination of the three?
KC: I would say it’s an unholy combination. I mean, we do our best. All of our metadata comes from publishers, we don’t generate anything in house. We do try to QA it, you know? Essentially take a look over it, make sure that it’s not some of the stuff that you would see on Amazon or something like that, where people don’t really look at the metadata and just kind of shove it in there.
We did over the last couple of years do a lot of extensive work on changing the way that we treat comic books in the database, because comic books and manga are very different than just books and they’re organized differently. They’re actually organized a little bit more similarly to academic periodicals than anything else. So we’ve been doing a lot of work at trying to make sure that metadata is up to a very specific standard for comics and manga. We keep on top of it if anything’s weird. We do encourage people that see weirdness in Libby and stuff like that to send a support ticket or reach out to their librarian. Because we will fix that. If you see it, we can we can fix it.
Because of the unique nature of comics as a serialized medium, does Libby offer libraries the ability to purchase comics in bulk? For example: All of “Demon Slayer” has come out. Each volume normally would be purchased for, you know, $9.99 on the open market. However much it is digitally, I know is…contentious and sometimes quite a lot more.
KC: We encourage publishers to try and keep things in line with print prices, but sometimes it doesn’t work out.
Are you able to offer say, ten volumes for the price of five or, you know, a whole series? Because sometimes libraries will be coming to it late and buying it all at once.
KC: No, unfortunately, we don’t offer any kind of package deals like that.
Is it because of restrictions from the publishers?
KC: More than likely. I don’t know the specifics behind that business arrangement but that sounds about what would be the good reason.
Are there any comics that you hope would be getting more more circulations
KC: That I hope? That I wished that they would? My favorite comic is “The Unwritten.” It’s a Vertigo comic book from DC from, like, 2008 or something like that and it does not circulate really well. Mostly because it is just a…I have an MA in English and I really love English literature, especially comparative literature, and that’s all that comic book is about. It’s a little lofty and weird so I’m not surprised that it doesn’t circulate. But…
Yeah. Not surprised.
KC: It’s one of those niche ones that you really just kind of…I found that just on the shelf when it first came out at my local comic book shop. I was like “This looks interesting.” Read the first issue and I’m like, “Well, I’m just gonna subscribe to this now.”
Do you think the serialized nature of comics has made it easier to discover digitally? Either it or subsequent volumes versus, say, a book in a digital collection because I know discoverability is is one of those challenges for digital libraries.
KC: Discoverability is difficult for all formats, regardless of ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, whatever. I think that the sheer volume of comic books lends a little bit to its discoverability but it still encounters the same issues that you would find with regular eBooks and audiobooks and stuff like that. Like I said, we try our best with organizing the metadata in ways that make things easily searchable. But again, we get all that from our publishers so we do what we can with what we got.
Continued below
I keep thinking about “Dog man.” What are the numbers? What are the numbers on “Dog man?” Cause, like, in print we have like 10 copies of every volume so I’m really curious what the digital looks like.
KC: When NPD bookscan for last year came out, I want to say the top 45 circulating titles was like all “Dog man,” “Captain Underpants,” anything Jeff Kinney, anything Raina Telgemeier. Then you saw like, manga here and there, like a couple of volumes of manga. I don’t think I can give you specific numbers about how “Dog man” or whatever is circulating. But it is way up there. It’s way up there.
Can you give like specific places instead of like, you know, “Dog man:” 10,000 purchases, 100,000 circs?
KC: I would say that the “Dog man” series collectively is like, number one. 100%
What would be the top five? What’s the top manga? And then what’s the top, like, traditional American comic book?
KC: Top traditional American comic book is “Miles Morales: Spider-Man.”
Oh, right right right.
KC: The top manga I believe still is “My Hero Academia,” but it might have been switched around with “Demon Slayer,” which is what we were talking about earlier. And then yeah, “Dog man,” Captain Underpants. That stuff’s just blowing all of that out of the water.
Do you think younger kids are also more likely to be reading comics, digitally, through their library than older audiences that would be gravitating towards the single issue then collected into trade?
KC: Yeah, actually. I actually did a presentation about this last week at digipalooza where we’re talking a little bit about, you know, physical is still king for comic books. Mostly because of collectors. My comic book collection takes up like, that whole wall plus that back corner and plus there’s a closet over there. It’s got stuff in it and there’s some stuff in the attic, so physical still king for comic books.
But we’re seeing, especially for younger audiences – you know, those darn kids are glued to their phone (I’m just kidding.) – they are reading a lot more often on digital than they are physically. So we’re seeing those numbers start to change. I wanted to say it was like 68% of all comic book sales for the last year were physical, but it going down because the year before that it was like 80 something percent of all comic book sales. So it’s changing. It’s just changing slowly.
With people reading more digitally, have we hit the rise in newer markets of comics? I’m specifically thinking of collections of webtoons manhwa & manhua from both mainland China and then South Kore and whatnot. I’m seeing more and more of that making its way off of their original vertical scroll platforms. Have those started to trickle through?
KC: Sort of. We don’t get a lot of the webtoons stuff. Actually, I don’t think we have any of the webtoons stuff. They have their own publishing platform. So…
They don’t wanna license it out?
KC: Yeah. I mean, they’ve got a good thing going. They might as well keep it to themselves right? We have seen an increase in Manhua coming in specifically from Chinese publishers, because it is a very popular thing in China, which is a market that we’re trying to get into. Also an increase in our South Korean offerings, which we don’t have a whole lot right now but we’re working on trying to get in with some of the publishers there as well. But the offerings right now for non manga, Asian comics are limited but growing.
Are any trends in those you’ve seen been growing in popularity within Libby versus seeing it in the wider culture? Or is it mostly the wider culture and then you see it reflected in circulations?
KC: It’s definitely the wider culture and then we see it starting to be reflected in the Libby. It’s very interesting. Library communities can either be predictive – look at the way that certain things are moving in a library and they can be predictive of future trends – or more often, especially with comic books, it’s all reactive. You’ll see something will happen in the world, new movie, TV show, marketing campaign for specific anime or something like that, and then boom, you see circulation start flying off the shelves for specific things.
Continued belowWhy do you think that is?
KC: I don’t know. [Laughs.] I really don’t. It is interesting to watch though.
Like “Miles Morales” was probably nice and heavily influenced by the success of the second Spider-verse movie.
KC: Well, no. I mean, the first Spider-verse movie.
Oh wow. I didn’t realize this was still from then. Wow, that movie really had impact.
KC: It did, it did. As somebody who’s an old comic book nerd, even watching that first Spider-verse movie and seeing the Comics Code Authority label pop up in the opening credits, I was like, “Wow. That’s weird but cool. I haven’t seen one of those on a comic book in a long time.”
