7 Days of Stack Week – Part 6: Cloud Storage and Digital Guilt

It's that time of year again. In what's become an annual tradition here at iFanboy we have our version of Shark Week on Discovery (and/or other podcasts). It's STACK WEEK! 

What exactly is STACK WEEK?  It's that special time when a man looks at his stack with a well honed mixture of longing and contempt only to realize that it's not the stack's fault… it's his.

I scored an iPad for Christmas. I wanted it because as a scientist I read a veritable butt-load of pdfs every week (more than comics, I’m sorry to say). I found myself constantly distracted trying to read them on my computer screen but equally frustrated printing them out only to be crumpled at the bottom of the bag, stained by any number of potential liquids or lost in the stratigraphic column of forgotten papers on either of my desks. So obviously the only reasonable solution is a several hundred dollar gizmo.

It should go without saying that part of my reasoning behind getting an iPad was the other facet of academic life: constant moving (i.e. moving boxes upon boxes of comics). I’ll be at my current university for a few more years, and then I’ll be off to 2 or 3 more schools before finally settling down (maybe). And like many prior columnists the prospect of a move, especially a move involving all my comics, kind of sucks.

Finally, I live in a big city but at the same time I have yet to find a good local comic shop. While this truly sucks, even in Santa Cruz I was never a Wednesday morning or even afternoon/evening guy. I wandered down to the shop when I had time and knew the owner would be available to shoot the breeze and talk comics with fewer interruptions. I don’t have a weekly podcast (well, I do, but not about comics) so I can get away with this level of infrequent visitation. Sadly, my current local shop feels like the afterthought of a record store. And since I happily live my life online I figured why not try this digital comics thing?

So I got the iPad, downloaded the necessary apps (Comixology, Marvel, iVerse and, of course, Graphic.ly) and played around with each of them to see which reading experience I preferred. I grabbed a bunch of their free comics and thought, “Great! Free comics!” and then proceeded to not really read any of them. It’s hard because these apps really do offer up a lot of great content but the app I found myself gravitating towards was my good old fashioned pdf reader through which I have enjoyed some of the fantastic recent offerings of the nascent “2-dollar-digital-indie” movement.

The dedicated apps offer a lot of flash and style, but I generally already had my pdf reader open with some sexy science paper and it was easier to click over to something in the same format within the same app. I know it sounds like the height of laziness to claim it was too much hassle to switch apps but I actually pride myself on using my iPad as a productive machine and not as a toy. Part of maintaining that is the self-discipline of not just using it to read comics.

Well now I have this virtual stack, and unlike Jimski’s I actually carry mine around with me. I get not wanting to read pdfs of silver age comics on an actual computer. They’re clunky, his screen almost certainly has the wrong aspect ratio and a computer comes with so many built in distractions.  Even if the books aren't physically with me I know they're in "the Cloud." That emphermeral internet space where data floats like ghosts and somewhere, in some server space, comics are connected to my username and remain unread. The stack has gone global, people.

My iPad is as mobile as I am and I do find myself reading in fits and spurts while waiting here and there just like I would with a regular book, but those things I’m reading aren’t generally the comics tucked away in the flash drives. I feel a measure of guilt over this, but then again, I haven’t broken down to start paying for within app comics. I’m a poor struggling grad student who is lucky to have an iPad, why add insult to financial injury by buying more stuff with said pad? And free comics just don’t have the same “read me” pull of something you actually spent money on. Ron also pointed out on a Taste of Comics that once I pay for a comic I can only ever read it in that specific app, which frankly kind of sucks. Graphic.ly is legitimately nice in that regard because it is cross-platform but the beauty of mp3s is that you can play them through any number of programs once you’ve purchased them and it’d be nice to see something similar for my iPad.

So I’m not reading comics on the go but why not curl up with my iPad at home? At home I have that damn physical stack all the non-Jimski columnists keep going back to. I fight against mine and feel like I only ever make incremental progress on weekend mornings before I realize all the errands I should be running. And I spread my physical stack out to prevent it from intimidating me too. I have a short box of to-read stuff, a column on the nightstand, a few scattered books around my desk, and then an entire small bookcase in my room.

But at the end of the day I can leave all those stacks behind just by going for a nice bike ride, but the thing I can’t leave behind? The data. The bits and bytes floating through cyberspace which contain comics I could access and read at literally any second of any day if I would only take the time to do so. That is the true terror; when the wireless information floating around us becomes digital guilt reminding us of our failings as comic readers. It’s where I’m slowly heading, and heaven help me if I actually break down and start paying for comics through the apps.

The worst thing of all? If I really wanted to I could get any and all of these apps and their respective comics on my phone too.

[Disclosure: iFanboy is owned by Graphic.ly, a digital comics platform. The opinions expressed in this column are those of Ryan Haupt.]

Ryan Haupt thinks the iFanboys should just go ahead and give his column to WATSON, since it’s obvious to him that the robots are taking over soon anyways and he’d rather spend his remaining days catching up on his stack. Silently judge his non-comics hobby over at Science… sort of.