Yes. In fact, "Bone" was under Cartoon Books with us, not on the Scholastic label. Right along the lines of the Seven Seas stuff, its expansiveness of genre and demographic appeal -- that's why we are around. We are here to expand the market, we're here for more people to be into comics, and I think the key to that is having a super wide range of content, and the second key, which we're working on, is making sure we can figure out how do we get you to the content you'll like fast enough to get you engaged. The content is first. You have to have the content before you can do any of that stuff.

I talked to Scholastic the first time, I'm pretty sure, the year we released the iPhone app here in San Diego, so it has been at least three years, maybe four, since I started talking to them, and I am super pleased to have more adolescent, more young person works available. We are getting to have a pretty amazing catalog of kids' books.

One of comiXology's ads circulated during Comic-Con International 2013.

How is comiXology marketing that material specifically to a younger audience? It seems like that's always the problem with digital and kids.

That's the next step. How do we get in front of the parents and do the right kind of PR and get people to write about it in the right magazines. It's an effort we have to do with Scholastic and companies like DC, with all the DC Nation books and all that. It's going to be a collaborative effort. But we existed because of the nature of early adopters and comic books in a very tech oriented demographic. Now we are getting material that nobody is that insane about tech, but they all have tablets, they all have technology. We did a survey late last year it was pretty staggering the percentage of people that work in tech that use our products. It's just a lot. So this is about broadening the audience and broadening the demographic. The Comics 4 Kids app hasn't been downloaded nearly as much as I think it should. That is about getting the word out and getting it out to the right people.

Apart from select manga publishers and Dark Horse, most publishers are partnered with comiXology. However, Image and more recently, Thrillbent -- in addition to publishing through comiXology -- are beginning to offer direct downloadable, DRM-free PDFs as a first party. What's your take on this trend, and is it something comiXology would do? Would comiXology sell DRM-free PDFs?

If we could figure out the customer experience in conjunction with that, sure. But I don't see it right now. DRM, not DRM, it doesn't really matter. The fact is that our experience is based around the idea that you can buy and read your comics anywhere you want whenever you want. I don't really want to have to have the customer support experience of teaching people how to move a file from their desktop to their iPad and dang it, I'm in the airport, and I can't put a jump drive on my iPad that has all my terabytes of comics. We are not in the world of people stacking up hard drives in their media center any more. There is a cross section of people, I think it is a very small population who say on an almost religious basis, "It has to be non-DRM and I have to have the file because it gives me some sort of comfort." The idea that was said in a couple of articles that an earthquake could take us offline just doesn't understand the technology behind how that works.

With the Guided View stuff and the fact that when you get a comiXology comic you know what the experience is going to be like, you can read on your iPad, and if you stop reading it on your iPad you can pick it up on your Android phone, it will find where you are in that book, and then it will format it to Guided View so it is really readable on your phone. Amazon and iBooks, if you stick either one of those on your iPhone, it will be completely unreadable. Have you ever tried to get a Word document onto your iPad from the cloud? You have to open up iTunes, go to the applications folder, select the application, then there is a place where you can actually drag in files, sync it through iTunes to your iPad, and it will move that file over to that app. That's not us. We're about ease of use and tons of content being available all the time. And I'm the great example of this: 15 minutes before the plane ride, I've got a Wi-Fi connection, I'm downloading ten books for that plane ride. I salute and certainly approve of everybody experimenting any way they want to experiment. We have a whole experience from top to bottom, and that does not work with a PDF.

And we will send you a different file on the iPhone than when you are on your retina iPad. It's appropriate for your device, how much memory you have on your device, how much RAM it can use.

ComiXology announced its Comics app in 2009, and has since expanded its catalogue and implemented many technical improvements.

Here's an example: iTunes Match is cool, I can spend $25 a year and anywhere I am, Apple will send me my music files. I don't have to sync to iTunes on my computer. That's the difference from before when your music files were your responsibility, and if you didn't back it up, which most people don't, sorry, that's it. You can't just keep re-downloading it. I think Apple allowed you one major re-download, quietly, but with iTunes Match I spend a little money and it's there. We're always there we're always delivering to whatever device you have. You just can't do that with PDFs or CBRs or CBZs.

I don't know if you noticed, but half the silhouettes are women in our posters and the banners [at the CCI booth]. We're about expanding the market, and we are not going to expand the market by going more technically scary. We're going to do it by like, "Oh, I didn't even have to think about it." Nobody ever thinks about the files, they understand it's here when they don't have a connection, but they don't go, "Do I need to back that up?" They're just like, "It's there, I'm going to read now," because that's what they are here for, the reading. Not file organization.

In the beginning, there was a lot of concern about control, that you might sneak in in the middle of the night, as you did with that Thor issue that was released too early, and take it back.

We offered refunds. That's very difficult. You can't keep somebody from screenshotting their devices, so that would have been out there. And that was not permanent. In fact, we have had some licensing issues where we have managed to make sure that those issues stay completely available for people. Our mantra is good karma, that's one of our values. If you come into our office we have a values poster, and the very top one is karma. It's about being good to each other and doing the right thing for customers. Eventually you will have an issue. If you have built up trust and been transparent and as visible as you can to them, they will give you a pass. They will say, "I love comiXology. They are going to make this right. I know it." And then we do, and that's just so important in a transition to digital because it's a scary thing for some people.

It seems so ephemeral.

And somehow that filename on your desktop makes it feel a little bit better for some people.

Initially a lot of publishers were exclusive to comiXology, and now I see many of them offering their graphic novels on e-book platforms such as Kindle, Nook and Kobo. Prices are sometimes a dollar or two lower on those platforms. Do you view them as direct competition or do you think you are serving different markets?

We are not serving different markets. Their experiences are so unfortunately not good that I fear people having their first experience with comics on those platforms rather than us, because we care about it a hell of a lot more than they do. I would just say, "Go, try them. Try the same books on all platforms and try it on your iPhone. You are not going to have as good an experience." And these are our partners; Apple and Google and Amazon have all been very good to us on the app side, and I treasure our partnerships that have made this possible, but the book sides don't get it.

What made you think that French-language comics would be the logical next frontier for comiXology?

It's because it's an amazing market with an amazing amount of content. It's almost the size of the U.S. market so the per capita purchasing of comic books is enormous, and BD [bandes dessinees, French comics] are read by a much more demographically diverse audience, whether it's male, female, different ages, different types of content. It's what the U.S. market should look like, and if it did, we would be a $5.5 billion market. The direct market, while it saved comics on the one hand, constrained and made a risk averse business, so it has multiplied the effects of male sci-fi/superhero only. That's not how I see it in the long term.

We were already the top grossing book app in France, against French language competition, with only English language navigation and content, so we thought the brand was understood and accepted there. We opened the office in late fall, and when we did our most recent iOS French language release, plus some real store navigation for the French market, we already had publishers that represent 40% of the print market there signed up. That's way faster than we did it in the U.S. market, and it's something I'm really proud of. The market is amazing content, and it's an amazing market. They behave very similarly to the U.S. market, not in terms of Wednesday releases and periodicals but in terms of how the comic books are laid out and read. [It's] Very, very similar. Our technology applies really easily, the shopping applies really easily.

What's next for comiXology as 2013 wraps up and 2014 is on the horizon?

A couple of weeks ago we did our first personalized e-mail recommending stuff based on what you purchased. I think that's so important, and this idea that we need to get you to the content as fast as we can that you'll like is a huge priority for us.

What were the nature of the emails sent to customers? What was the purpose of the test?

It was a limited test, 10 or 15 books, and then we suggested other books based on that purchase. They are just now getting to the data did we do OK with this, how's our algorithm for recommendations, I think that's incredibly important. There are some things on the horizon, iOS 7 is about to come out. That's a huge change in interface. The buttons are all in the same place but it looks completely different.