How to Use iPhone as a Comic Book Reader

August 3rd, 2008 by Sherm

“Is it possible to read comics on my new iPhone 3G?” was the first question on my mind after I finally got my hands on my new geeky gadget. I bet with all the new iPhone apps, somebody makes a .cbr reader for iPhone, right?

Using my iPhone as a <!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->comic<!-- google_ad_section_end --> Book Reader

I got the iPhone 3G because it’s a tiny little Internet browser (I hardly ever use it as an actual phone). I’m kind of addicted to reading the various comic book blogs, and I love the idea of being able to surf the blogosphere while waiting in line or during bumper-to-bumper traffic. Kidding on that last one.    For now.

First stop: see if there is a comic book reader iPhone app that does the trick…hopefully an iPhone app that can read .cbr, .cbz and .pdf files. A Google search brought up a couple candidates, but they’re hacks that require you to “jailbreak” your iPhone (in other words, hacking the iPhone software and reprogramming it yourself). Look…I just spent a good chunk of change on this pretty gizmo…I’m not interested in “cracking” it!
Nope…not going THAT route.

You CAN read comics on the iPhone

The iPhone’s built-in Photo viewer application seemed to work pretty well, so the first thing I did was create a folder containing some Bob Hope comic scan jpegs. I created that folder by unzipping a standard .cbr file into separate jpegs. I do that by changing the .cbr extension to .rar and then unarchiving them. Then I synced that image folder with my iPhone…

Good idea, but when I viewed the pages on the iPhone, I found them to have been magically degraded in resolution…so much that images were too blurry to comfortably read. What gives? Turns out that the iPhone automatically “optimizes” (= ruins) the images when you import them. No workaround for this yet.

PDF files don’t get degraded when you import them into your iPhone, but the iPhone needs a native PDF reader even more than it needs a comic book reader application. The only way to get a PDF file into your iPhone right now is to email it to yourself and read it as an attachment. I don’t want to wait for a 35Mb download over the iPhone’s bandwidth. Not a viable solution IMHO.

Reading Comic Books on the iPhone

Lastly, I used screen-capture software to take screen-caps of the individual panels of a comic story. I used SnagIt (which I love dearly…it’s like Photoshop for screengrabs) to capture and compile a folder full of single-panel — or sometimes single-tier — images which I then put in a folder and synced to the iPhone. This approach actually produced a nice readable iPhone comic!
The only problem with this method was that it was extremely tedious
and time-consuming to make individual captures of all those panels.

Sigh.

There are some promising apps I’ll be looking at in the next few days. Until then, please let me know what’s been working for you, and enjoy these links to more iPhone comic book reader news:

More links about using iPhone as Comic Book Reader:
Still More iPhone 3G links…but just for fun ^_^

Apple iTunes

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7 Comments

  • At 2008.08.06 00:04, John Hickey said:

    http://www.comicsearch.co.uk/f.....board=10.0

    This is a link to Comic Tree, which is a comic reader that has a web server built in to it. Seems to work pretty well with my iTouch. Just turn on the web server under “Options”, point your iTouch/iPhone to your computer’s ip address, and off you go! At my house, I just browse to 192.168.2.200:5050 and it works fine. I use dyndns to give my home a dns name, so in theory I could read comics anywhere there is an internet connection.

    [Reply]
    • At 2008.08.19 14:39, douglas said:

      Did you take all your screenshots at the iPhone’s native resolution, or just cut up the panels and trust them to appear “okay”?

      The panel-by-panel screenshot seems to be the approach that would produce that best reading experience… I don’t have SnagIt, but maybe there’s a free screenshot tool that lets you define the X and Y of a the image and then you could zip through an unpacked CBR pretty quickly, I reckon…

      [Reply]
      • At 2008.08.19 15:00, Sherm said:

        Hi Douglas…yeah, I just cut up the panels by eyeballing the size and trusting it to be OK. The native iPhone photo import only seems to ruin the resolution of th really large images. The process I first used of using a screen capture program to cut up the comic page into panels DOES provide a great reading experience…it’s just a pain to do it.

        There are many screen capture programs that will do what SnagIt does…I just think SnagIt is the best. Check out this article for more Windows screen-capture tools: http://labnol.blogspot.com/200.....e-for.html

        Mac users can capture any region of their screen for free by pressing Command-Shift-4 (in sequence…no dashes.)

        Thanks for stopping by…let me know how it works out ^_^

        –sherm

        [Reply]
        • At 2008.08.19 15:40, douglas said:

          Okay, I’ve found some nifty screenshot utilities that will help me take a series of photos at exactly 480×320 resolution. GrabberRaster for the Mac does so with style and is free. So I’m going to open CBRs in a reader, scale to the size I think best, and shoot 480×320s frame by frame and see what I get.
          I have CBRs for almost all of my IRL comic collection. :-) Better solution: I can imagine a computer program in which you would define the frame boarder for a comic (white, black lines of certain thickness, etc.) and then the program would chop up all the frames and output them in sequential file order for you… THAT would be impressive… though of course modern comics love to play around with order and placement and etc.

          [Reply]
          • At 2008.08.25 17:04, Touchtip said:

            Today iVerse announced a new comic book reader that will soon be available in the App Store. Read more about it here:
            http://www.macworld.com/articl.....c=rss_main

            [Reply]
            • At 2008.08.25 17:12, Sherm said:

              @Touchtip: Thanks for the tip!

              [Reply]
              • At 2010.02.15 20:26, Oscar Gonzalez said:

                Hi, what i tried is:

                I changed the CBR file to RAR, then i unzipped all the jpeg files to lets says Batman 404.
                Using PrimoPdf i printed all the pictures into 1 Batman 404 PDF.
                Then using Fileapp (http://www.digidna.net/products/fileapp) uploaded the pdf to the iphone. The comic is easier to read.

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