Due in January 2011, the Dark Horse Bookshelf app and online digital comic store will charge $1.49 per digital issue, 50 cents lower than the most common price for digital comics.

The announcement, made in conjunction with the annual New York Comic Con, means that Dark Horse is not following in the steps of other major publishers. Publishers Marvel, DC, Image, and IDW, among others, have made deals with third-party developers to develop the software and market their apps. (For example, the Marvel and DC iPad apps are both based on the same Comixology engine that drives Comixology's own Comics app.)

Instead, Dark Horse president and publisher Mike Richardson told , Dark Horse has invested in its own technology, with a team of on-staff Web and iOS developers. Other publishers have to license technology from third-party developers and pay 30 percent of total sales to Apple for in-app purchases on the iOS. Dark Horse is avoiding those costs by building its own apps and bypassing Apple's purchasing system.

Avoiding Apple's e-commerce system will mean some added complexity for Dark Horse customers: like Amazon's Kindle app, the Dark Horse Bookshelf app will redirect users into the Safari web browser to make purchases direct from the Dark Horse online store. Readers can then read issues in the app or via a web browser on a desktop computer. And, in the future, on Android devices and many other platforms.

Users will also be able to control how they view the comic themselves, by panning and zooming. The apps will also include "Panel Zoom" view, which is a guided view that allows users to tap and let the app guide them from panel to panel, zooming and panning in order to tell the story.