Amazon has announced that, as of December 4, 2023, the Comixology app is officially done. Amazon purchased the digital comic book service in 2014, and has gradually blurred the lines between Comixology and its own Kindle digital book services. But come December, the standalone Comixology app will officially be no more.
This has been a long time coming; Amazon tried to merge Comixology with Kindle back in 2021, a move which faced immediate backlash from users. A year later, the company quietly redirected the Comixology URL to its own site — and mostly stopped updating the app after that.
What does this mean any Comixology books that you’ve already purchased? Well, you’ll need to download the Kindle app in order to access that content. Hardly the end of the world, I suppose, though still a bit frustrating; I’ve been using the Comixology app since 2010, and I’ve never had Kindle on my phone or tablet. I assume that you’ll be able to use the same Guided View features in the Kindle app — for, now at least. According to an FAQ, there will be an option in the Kindle app to limit your book views to “Comics & Manga,” so you can hide your prose books and only see your comic book purchases.
Of course, by “comic purchases,” I mean, “licenses to borrow comic book content from Amazon for an indefinite period of time, with no option to save the hard files to your hard drive to treat and use as your own.” Shortly after Comixology’s acquisition by Amazon, the company did begin to offer users the option to download DRM-free files of certain digital comic book purchases, depending on publisher agreements (Marvel and DC were both conspicuously absent from the list). But looking at my library of 3,000+ Comixology books, there’s currently no way for me to download backups of those files, if I hadn’t previously done so.
Not great!
Important Changes to the Comixology app starting December 4, 2023 [Amazon]
