Agh. So I haven't done much else with my "Comics and the Web" experiment. I don't know when I'll have the inclination to pick it up again so I'm just going to type out my thoughts before I forget:

As a comic buyer, I'd really like a site that offers a better Diamond Previews Catalog

• Flexible searching
• More cover art
• Recommendations based on your tastes
• Social aspects: spotlighted items can be voted on by ordinary people, public viewable "want lists". You could go crazy with this.. show hot books for each month, the most "controversial" books, etc
• Comments from publishers, creators and buyers
• RSS feeds and/or email alerts for new releases by creators that you are interested in
• Shopping cart capabilities that allow you to build an order form (with nice support for recurring subscriptions) for your friendly neighborhood comic dealer
• Maybe a way to track your purchases and inventory your collection
• Links that you can follow for more information (see below)

It's basically Amazon for comics with some extra goodies mixed in. I guess I could always quit comics and switch to graphic novels :)

You can find a lot of information on an upcoming comic by googling for the previews order code. I tried fooling with automatically discovering pages using Google blogsearch, Feedster, Technorati, etc. This didn't work very well - I ended up with a lot of shit (and holes) in my index. Take Brian Wood's Supermarket #1 (item # DEC05 3067) as an example:

• First of all, we know that this is a code that we are interested in because it previously appeared on Diamond's order form
• BrianWood.com talks about it
• View Askew's Newsarama contains a summary and a whole bunch of full page previews
• Mile High Comics has a cover, creator info, and some other metadata
• There are various mentions on blogs

It seems like people like Khepri or Mile High (who already maintain a product catalog) would be interested in using a "Better Previews" site like this to attract more customers. Yeah, they would be providing a valuable service and giving away information for free, but since they are offering discounts many users would end up *not* buying elsewhere because of the price (Hello, Amazon). And of course, you could go nuts with this expand it into a web-based subscription management and/or sales application for traditional or online retailers...