Izneo Closes Its English Storefront
Imagine my shock and horror loading Izneo.com the other day and discovering this:
“Closing“?
I saw flashing red lights and heard a loud klaxon blaring in both my ears.
Izneo has been the source for probably 90% of the books I’ve reviewed here in the last six years.
“Closing“?
Yes, as of the end of January, the English language store is going away. That includes both the store and its subscription program.
It is not the end of the world, however…
When a Store Closes, But You Can Still Buy Stuff…
It will be inconvenient for most, but it’s not the End of the World scenario that I originally thought it might be.
Books you’ve purchased at Izneo will still be available in your personal library. You can continue to buy them in the English language store through the end of the month, right up until it shuts down. They’ll remain in your library.
Europe Comics and Cinebook, specifically, will continue to sell their English language translations of European albums on the main French storefront. Those two made up almost 100% of the comics I read on Izneo, anyway, so I’m thrilled that they’ll still be available.
Those two publishers will be like a store-within-a-store — an oasis of English albums amongst a bevy of French language tomes. You can still buy the French edition if you want, but if you’re sticking with the English translations of these titles, you’ll find them in the Europe Comics or Cinebook section.
In fact, they’ll be offered as part of the dropdown from the navigation bar at the top of the site. I don’t know yet what the selection will be, but imagine “English BD” or “Cinebook/Europe Comics” or something similar at the bottom of this list:
We’ll see how the search works on the site, but I do advise you to be careful that you’re buying the right language edition of an album before hitting the final “Achete” (“Buy”) button.
English language editions of books from Boom!, IDW, and the like will be leaving the store. I’m not upset about that. I used Izneo only for Franco-Belgian comics. Those titles have only ever muddied the waters. The “New This Week” section was far too often filled with American publishers I had no interest in reading. If I did, I already had an account on Comixology/Amazon.
Time to Learn a Little Bit of French
Ultimately, the big change here is the storefront and not the store.
It’s the theming and not the content. Izneo will continue with its mission and still wants to sell lots of comics digitally to you. You’re just going to need to know that “Lire” means “Read” and “Abbone” means “Subscribe.” You’ll be navigating a French website to shop there.
If you’re not like me with a 1000+ day DuoLingo streak learning French, I understand how this might prove frustrating for you. I don’t like that I don’t have an easy English language version of the site to send new readers to, either. It’s a big roadblock. I’d hate to ask a casual reader to go to a foreign language site to read English-language comics.
On the other hand, The Entity Kinda Known As Comixology From the Right Angle still offers all the same titles from Cinebook and Europe Comics, anyway. American comic readers are probably best directed to that store for their own comfort and ease of use.
Amazon has made a mess of finding and purchasing digital comics these days, but that’s another story. You probably have Stockholm Syndrome there, though, and don’t realize it.
Focus and Features
Back to Izneo: It’s not just the English storefront that’s going away. The Izneo German and Dutch storefronts ended on December 31, 2022. The English store got an extra month by comparison.
This looks like a time of focus for Izneo. Rather than trying to be all things to all people, they’re consolidating around their core audience and focusing on them. They have plans, I’m told, to make adjustments to the app and website to better the user interface.
Who knows? Maybe a multi-language approach will return after the infrastructure is shored up and internationalization is easier to manage.
Maybe. I’m not holding my breath. If I did, I’d likely turn into a Smurf…
I don’t know the numbers they had for users or subscribers for the English store. I have to be honest — I doubt those numbers were huge. When it comes to English language comics in North America, it’s Comixology or bust. I don’t know the details or specific numbers at all, but I wonder if the maintenance of the English language site was ever worth it.
We all also know what’s going on in the tech world these days. The economy isn’t booming like it used to be. Stock prices are sinking, budgets are being carefully scrutinized, and companies are learning to do more with less. Izneo is cutting the fat and distractions. They’re zeroing in on their core business.
I hope this works for them. They’re a great organization and everyone I’ve dealt with over there have been great people. I want to see them thrive and then I want to see the big return of an English language store, complete with a huge media campaign and great English language content to woo in new readers. (After all, modern businesses are half media empires these days…)
It would coincide, of course, with the large-scale popularity and awareness of the awesomeness of Franco-Belgian comics in the English-speaking market that turns the format into the next Manga-like boom.
A man can dream, can’t he?
How This Impacts Pipeline Comics
While most of my usage of Izneo has been through the English language store, I’ve also always used the French language version. It’s how I look at the new issues of Spirou Journal nearly every week.
Occasionally, I flip through the pages of the site to look for books that aren’t being translated yet, just so I have something to complain about.
I’m a little slower in navigating the French site, but I know my way around. You get used to the French button labels pretty quickly.
From this website’s perspective, I have hundreds of links on this site that will probably all be broken next month. Yikes!
In the meantime, you can now safely ignore my introduction to Izneo.com which I just updated 11 months ago. Looks like I’ll need to update it to be a French-to-English dictionary now…
C’est la vie! Et bonne chance, Izneo!
Special thanks to Axelle Tricomi, Junior Project Manager at Izneo, for answering my questions for this article.
So you think that this storefront shrinkage (sounds like something you should talk to your specialized nether regions doctor about lol) is due to the general tech downsizing trend ? Or maybe more prosaic, the one intern who was manning it just graduated and moved on 😉 Feels weird to me, in hard times I’d broaden my appeal, not lessen it.
A bit of both, really. Over the years, though, I’ve talked to most of the interns who’ve run the English language store. They’re good people, but they don’t last long. I don’t think it was a very high priority, to be honest. They gave it a shot and put variable effort into it over the years. There were still parts of it where the translation needed a bit of fine-tuning.
I think they need to make sure whatever resources they have right now last as long as possible. They’re building their runway and putting their money and their focus on the biggest part of the business to help expand that. I can’t blame them. Trying to break into the English market is a huge goal, but Amazon is a very tall wall to try too break through, if only for a small percentage of the business.
This all sounds slightly fatalistic, but that’s my general worldview on comics these days, so it all makes sense. =)