A new comiXology experience is coming this fall

In a letter to customers, comiXology co-founder and CEO David Steinberger today announced several changes coming to the digital comics platform — changes that include a redesigned app and more integration with their parent company, Amazon.

According to the email, the changes you can expect include:

• An upgraded comiXology app that will include “flexible filtering and sorting, and some fun book navigation features.”
• The existing comiXology website will go away, and your “revamped digital comics shopping experience” will take place on Amazon.com instead. You can see what it’ll look like. Once they launch comixology.com will redirect to this page on Amazon.com.
• They are promising “faster, more reliable downloads” on Android and iOS devices. Cool. “Plus read-while-downloading is new for Android customers.” I don’t use Android, but I do enjoy this feature on iOS.
• “Kindle Unlimited and Prime members will be able to borrow from a large library of graphic novels and manga and read on the comiXology app, in select countries.” Now this I will definitely appreciate. I have Prime, I use my Amazon login to get into comiXology and its has always bugged me that I couldn’t access the stuff that’s available through Prime Reading for free (like comiXology Original titles) through the comiXology app.
• “ComiXology purchases will be readable on Kindle apps and devices.” Although I don’t have a Kindle device, this is a nice change for those who do, and shows how the two entities are making their technologies and systems work together.

The comiXology website has been due for an upgrade for awhile, and integrating it into the existing, bigger Amazon.com makes sense, I’m sure, from an internal perspective. Hopefully comics will become more prominent on the overall site as a result — on the home page, in search and wherever else they can market them to people looking for cat food or episodes of Panic or whatever. That being said, I know a lot of people hit the comiXology site regularly to look for sales and deals, so making that a bit more prominent on the new site would likely be welcomed.

comiXology Support has an FAQ up about the change; if you still use a comiXology login to access your account, it’s probably a good idea to go ahead and merge it with your Amazon account. You can find a link to do that in the FAQ.