Metro Manila Community Quarantine - Day 957
So I'm nearly 40 books behind the needed reading pace to hit my end-of-year goal of having read 365 titles within the year. I know a large part of what constitutes my reading includes digital comics via comiXology. And before you ask, I only count compilations/trade paperback equivalents as a "book" and not individual issues. Despite this, I'm still very behind.
When comiXology was folded into Amazon as Kindle Comics, it resulted in a lot of changes. The mobile app changed to be closer to the Kindle app without the ability to purchase comics (which is a Google Play thing more than an Amazon thing) with a lot of weird hiccups. Since the switchover, the mobile app has gotten generally better and feels a lot closer to the old comiXology app, with some exceptions.
The desktop experience has been a nightmare since overnight, we lost the comiXology website entirely. Instead, comics started to appear in the Kindle Cloud Reader, which is a decent book-reading experience but not a great comic-reading experience. In the months since the switchover, they've introduced a weird beta view that doesn't feel like the old comiXology desktop site and instead is trying to be more like those vertical scrolling webtoon sites. But I don't think that works very well for most digital comics that were based on print materials and favor horizontal reading. I haven't invested a lot of time into working with this new version since what I really want is GuidedView on desktop - properly programmed panel-by-panel reading. We get panel-by-panel views in the like Cloud Reader app but it's clunky and awkward. And books that I finish reading via the Cloud Reader don't count as read in the comiXology app for some reason.
I'm pretty sure that all these changes have contributed to changes in my reading habits and a general slowdown overall. And the fact that I can't quite catch up with my pace these days seems to reinforce this reality. I'm hardly reading on desktop and reading via mobile the app has only picked up in recent months as the experience has gotten relatively better. It doesn't help that a lot of the volumes I've been reading are more like thicker omnibuses that run some 300-500 pages long. That's still a lot to read for comics.
But I'm not going to give up. I still have a few months to go before the year ends. I haven't failed this reading challenge in years and I'm not going to start now.
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