If you've been looking for a reason to try out digital comic readers, this is it – Marvel (and Comixology) are offering up 700 #1 issues for free. They made an attempt at this last month and I'm guessing it was so popular that the servers had a tough time handling the volume since it was eventually shut down. I tried several times to sign up and was thwarted by time outs and errors.
They are now giving it another try and you can sign up at this page –
note: registration ends at 11:59pm ET on April 9th, 2013.
It appears you can sign up as a new user or log in with an existing account to request access to the 700 free #1 issues. It seems that the performance is still spotty since I'm seeing errors when accessing the page. YMMV too as you attempt to access the site.
When I was finally able to load the page, I logged in with my existing comixology id and registered for the free issues. The result was the following page –
I noticed the highlighted text and am speculating that the teams have decided to manually throttle the download volume by sending out invites a little at a time so as to not overload the servers.
This is a great marketing ploy as I assume it'll draw in some new readers and give them a taste of reading comics on a digital platform. For those who have been on the fence, 700 comics is a nice dangling carrot to move them forward on to tablet readers. I'm looking forward to some new reading material plus some digital copies of many #1s already in my collection.
Please let me know if you've signed up for these 700 comics either this time or the last time and if you've had a good experience.
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