It always surprised me that comics were so readily pirated. CDs are one thing, even DVDs: you put the disc in the drive, fire up your favourite application and most of them just handle it. It might take a couple of hours for a whole movie but that’s your computer’s time, you can go do something productive while your PC undermines copyright law and come back to a pristine digital file, bagged and tagged automatically with metadata and artwork.

The comic scanner, on the other hand, must first carefully remove the staples, then spread the pages on a flat-bed scanner. Then they fire up their favourite image editing program and, one by one, scan each page before slicing each image in half then tuning the colour balance so that each page looks right sat next to its opposite number scanned from a different sheet. Finally the images must be ordered and named before archiving them into a rar or zip file. It’s labour-intensive stuff, but these guys do it tirelessly, every Wednesday, slaving through the day and night so that a legion of people can get their comics fix.

Getting comics onto an iPad is no picnic either. The most reliable way is to make PDFs for Apple’s free iBooks app. Including the initial download it works out as a four-step process for getting your free comic fix.

Well today DC made their first same-day digital release through their brand-new iPad app: Issue #4 of Justice League: Generation Lost (which just happens to be fun comicking). At £1.79 it’s a modest saving of 41p versus a “real” store that’s likely due to an exchange rate wobble (the US price of $2.99 matches the comic’s American RRP), but the real drive here is the simplicity. I tap buy, confirm my iTunes password, and before my torrent client could have built up steam the issue is ready to read, right there in my hands. It’s the same process that Apple used to turn buying music and software into an effortless way to part customers from money.

It’s just one comic for now, with DC quiet about future plans, but it’s a good comic and it was stupidly easy to buy and enjoy. Hopefully the experiment works well and it’s not long before I can buy a new week’s Batman or Spider-man on my shiny Apple-toy. Until then, it’s an easy choice between driving half an hour to Nottingham or firing up Demonoid.