At the New York Comic Con Dark Horse Comics announced its Digital Publishing strategy, which it will launch in January.  Dark Horse is blazing its own trail with its iOS-based digital publishing, which unlike most of its publishing competitors, won’t result in ebooks being sold through iTunes. 

As Dark Horse’s Jeremy Atkins told ICv2: “There will be a Dark Horse bookshelf app available on iTunes store.  It will be searchable by all of our titles.  Once you are inside the app it will actually direct you to a Website hosted by Dark Horse where we will actually be selling all of our apps directly to consumers.  So therefore our creators will make more money.  The Dark Horse app on iTunes will be free and will come with a couple of titles, but when you go to download something else, instead of taking you to iTunes, it takes you to our site where we will hosting ourselves and actually selling directly to consumers.  Again what’s most important about that is that it’s going to mean more money for the creators and many of our titles are creator owned.”

 Dark Horse also plans to create some exclusive free content that will force consumers to go to comic shops to get a download code in order to access the free content.

As previously reported by ICv2, Dark Horse is also going its own way in the pricing of its digital content.  The publisher has announced that it will charge just $1.49 for a single-issue digital comic, which is 50 cents below the industry standard of $1.99 (see “Dark Horse Prices Digital Comics at $1.49”).