Over the weekend, the popular LiveJournal comic book community scans_daily was closed down.  Members of the community used the site to post pages from comic books so that they as a group could discuss them.

Some are speculating that it was writer Peter David that got the site shut down.  He recently went to the site when he discovered that people there were posting pages of his X-Factor #40 and criticizing the storyline.  He logged on with his wife’s LiveJournal account and argued with the people that were criticizing his work.  He then evidently reported the site to Marvel Comics for copyright infringement:

I told Marvel, yes, without hesitation, because someone posted a link to it over on Comic Book Resources.  It was a flagrant copyright violation, it was spreading all over the internet, and I had a personal stake in it.  My year-long goal is to try and triple sales on this book; putting up free scans of the entire issue is that thousands of fans can read it without having to pay a dime kneecaps that goal.  It’s “Wow, this issue is great, you should go out and buy it” versus “Wow, this issue is great, you should hit this link and read it for free.”

Except people were not putting up scans of the entire issue. From what I can gather, less than half the issue was posted. Also, people weren’t saying this issue is great. In fact, they were kind of saying the complete opposite.

Shortly after that the site was shut down.  Peter David claims that he had nothing to do with the site being taken down.

Needless to say, many former members of scans_daily are quite perturbed that their beloved community was taken away from them.  Many of them point out that scans_daily is what got them back into buying and reading comics again.  They contend that posting images from comic books on scans_daily actually generated more comic book sales.  Peter David rejects this argument because he says that during the five years that scans_daily has been around, comic book sales have dropped.

Peter David wrote :

Okay. But I would counter that Scans has been around for five years and during that five years we’ve seen sales overall slide and slide and slide.

Now: Can we prove cause and effect that it’s hurt? No. No more than we can prove that it’s helped. But if you’re trying to make the case that it HAS helped, then based on the steady decline of sales that matches up with how long it’s been around, I think you’ll have a difficult time doing so empirically.

PAD

The problem with what Peter David is saying is that it’s simply not true.  Comic sales — both in the amount of money generated and the number of individual copies sold  — have increased in the five years since scans_daily has been around.

John Jackson Miller posted the following on Peter David’s blog in the comment section:

2003 73.02 million copies
2004 74.14 million copies
2005 76.13 million copies
2006 81.85 million copies
2007 85.27 million copies
2008 81.34 million copies

I had pointed out in an earlier comment that comic sales had risen during the years that daily_sIt’s important to note that 2008 saw a slight decline in sales volume from the previous year, but the number of comics sold in 2008 is still substantially higher then the number of comics sold before scans_daily came into existence.

Update: Peter David posted on his blog that he was wrong about comic sales decreasing the past five years and he posted the sales figures provided by John Jackson Miller that show this.