I’ve tinkered around a bit with Goshenite, which I use to pre-order American comics. I like pre-ordering, because then there’s less of a chance of me buying the same thing over and over again — I’ve got the memory retention skills of an easily distracted squirrel.
(This is for mainstreamey comics only — the stuff you find in bookstores and the like. The really good stuff is to be found at Domino Books, of course.)
The reason I wrote Goshenite in the first place is because everything sucked, but now things are so bad that even Paul Gravett’s reliable overview of good upcoming books (that I consult in addition to Goshenite, just in case I missed something) is down to being a shadow of itself. He only lists six (6) books this month! Presumably because he has no idea how to find out what’s coming out these days.
The two major distributors are Penguin Random House (which has DC/Marvel, as well as other, largerish (or bookstore-oriented) publishers), and if you have the patience to look through things there, I applaud you. But it’s actually a pretty nice web site to extract data from (but you have to use Selenium to find the links), so that works fine for me (via Goshenite).
Lunar has most of the publishers that PRH presumably said no to distributing, and that web site is just about unbrowsable. Each individual book doesn’t even have a web page, so you can’t even google stuff reliably. The closest you get is this janky search page.
(And try looking at the book info there — it’s impossible to say who the publisher is?)
For the publishers that are so small that even Lunar won’t carry them, there’s Philbo. And they have basically no web pages at all — just a PDF catalogue, so none of those are scrapable, so I can’t put them on Goshenite at all. *slow clap*
And all the places that actually sell comics have web sites that suck. Midtown is probably the best — they do a good job at carrying everything — but it’s slow and janky:
But worse is the just absolutely horrible way to look at preorders — if you enjoy scrolling through nine hundred variant covers (four at a time) to perhaps find something you’re interested in, well… you’re in luck:
Goshenite displays all variants of an issue on one page:
In short — everything sucks, and after Diamond went belly up, it’s even worse than before, and I didn’t think that would be possible.
But I think Goshenite still pretty much works, even though there’s suspiciously few books listed there. I don’t have total confidence that my scripts are finding everything, but…
Perhaps everybody’s just slowly going bankrupt because nobody is able to buy anything?