DMotoes

Ever since e-ink readers started appearing I’ve wanted a color e-ink reader that could display digits comics as vividly as the real thing. Unfortunately, such an e-ink device is still no where close to existing. However, the iPad is proving that it may actually be just the device I’ve been waiting for.

Sure, the iPad is probably a bit heavier than you’d like for such a device, it weighs over twice as much as the Kindle, but it also displays images in full color and at a much higher resolution. And if course, it also does so much more then just being an eBook reader (I’m writing is post on the iPad!).

Since the iPad wasn’t design specifically for being an eComic reader, we’re at the mercy of 3rd party developers to design an app to transform the iPad into the perfect reader. I honestly didn’t expect to see any CBR readers available on launch day so I was very pleasantly surprised to find two such capable apps. This is in addition to other comic readers such as the Marvel app which likely use some proprietary format and doesn’t allow you to sync over your own files.

The two apps are Comic Reader Mobi ($14.99) and ComicZeal ($7.99). After briefly researching the two, I decided to try out Mobi because it uses your actual CBR files where as ComicZeal requires you to convert them to their own format.

The first thing you’ll notice about Comic Reader Mobi is that it isn’t pretty, it doesn’t look anything like a polished iPad/iPhone app. Even the app icon isn’t nice to look at. But the ui is simply a means to load the right comic you want to read, so as long as it’s functional and doesn’t get in my way, I can overlook it for now. To load your comics into the app, you’ll need to use an ftp client to connect to the iPad and upload them, not the most user friendly but there’s really no good methed available provided by the iPad yet (how awesome would it be to mount network shares). (UPDATE: I just discovered the file sharing method provided through iTunes which is a much more friendly method but also limited, there’s no uploading of folders) The name of any folders will be listed as the  name of the series and you can navigate through them to select the file you want to load.

Performance is very good even with hi-resolution scans. If you try to quickly flip through pages you’ll see a pause loading the next page, and possibly even crash, but if you go at the pace you actually read, then it should go smoothly as it looks to preload the next page.

There’s two navigation methods, either swiping or turning on very transparent arrow buttons that appear at the bottom corners which are easy to tap with your thumbs. You can also zoom in slightly, probably to actual size, and it also has a neat text zoom ability that scans the image where you tapped looking for all the text in that area and pops up a zoomed box of that text. It’s a feature from the iPhone app which isn’t needed so much on the iPad, but it does work well.

If you’ve looked at the other comic apps like Marvel’s, you may have seen the guided mode it offers that shows you a cropped image of one image box at a time. This doesn’t have that feature but it’s really more of a gimmick unless the comic was designed with that feature in mind. Reading a comic in the Marvel app in the non-guided mode is a near identical experience to using CRM.

After reading multiple comics this weekend using this app, there’s only one feature I’d really like to see added and that is the ability to show two pages side-by-side. It sorta does this when you are using the swiping mode, but it’s not the same thing. If it had that, then feature wise Comic Reader Mobi would be a very solid reader. It certainly has bugs that need to be worked out and the UI could use a massive overhaul, but for the first version on launch day, I’m happy. I have a massive comic library in my iPad, it’s a dream come true!

Looking over CRM’s forums, it sounds like there could be some nice enhancements coming to the app which is great to hear. It’ll likely have tough competition from ComicBookLover’s iPad version which is my favorite OS X CBR reader. I can’t wait to see how things are a couple months from now.