I have well over 1000 superman and batman comics. I buy them monthly also.
I prefer to have the book in hand. Comics are one of those collectable things and good luck collecting digitally. If I cant have the books to collect and resell then I wouldnt pay very much for them. They should go back to $0.10 for the digital version. Its just not the same.
/Nods
I think our way is done, though. The future is this.
Full disclosure: I own a hobby gaming store and following a strong autumn with good revenue from big releases in Magic: the Gathering and other products, we have been assessing the business cases for adding various product categories, including toys, sports cards, console gaming, and yes, comics. (We already have a vintage arcade and do a lot of eBay business.) There are other factors weighing against comics (you are forced to do business with Diamond, the exclusive distributor of Marvel products, and Diamond sucks, as does their game subsidiary Alliance Distribution) but the biggest factor of all is that dead tree media is on its last legs. And that's a shame because the content quality for comics is generally good and they have a significant public following that we'd like to attract as customers, and that as a positive factor is a significant favorable aspect of the category. You don't sell a thing unless you can get a customer to walk in the door.
Right now, we wouldn't dare put any serious money into paper comics. It will probably be possible to field a full store's inventory worth of books in ~2015 for a tiny fraction of the price of that same store stock today. As comics-only shops go belly up, as they consistently do (Arizona's longstanding champion chain Atomic Comics committed tax suicide and closed all its shops in 2011) it may be possible to make big buys for nothing on the dollar. But any more than that, and there's a fair chance you're buying a bunch of mulch/firewood.
The reason for this is simple: They can reprint EVERY issue this way. All the way back to 80-year-old vintage stuff. It can be "remastered" and appear with no paper stains, discoloring, damage, and so on. It can be read an infinite number of times by an infinite number of paying readers without disintegrating a paper issue. Every comic ever made can become a revenue driver all over again, times infinity. It's a treasure trove of IP unheard of in modern media. I wish I had been in a position to buy their IP and back catalog rights before the iPad came out. The future in media is in millions upon millions of microtransactions.
And BTW, the difference between this and something like Comixology, which is a great platform, is that everyone has the iTunes store built into their iOS device and so the IP has much greater reach, and so it actually justifies all the work to make those back-issues available. Also, a lot of folks are squeamish about buying ANYTHING digitally, and have only just gotten comfortable with Apple's digital offerings, and won't likely move beyond that for some time if ever, and that's making a big assumption that they even notice that other platforms exist. The younger buyers will seek out, and spend profligately on, any platform, but wait for them to have a real once-bitten Come-to-Jesus moment as soon as some platform goes belly-up and they lose all "their" paid-for collection on it.
Anyway that's how I assess the comics landscape right now and in the wake of this news, I would say that the old way of reading comic "books" is a clock reading 11:57 p.m.. Take my industry expertise (or don't) for what you will.