comiczeal Speaking of reading comics on e-book readers, here is a developer blog post about the upcoming iPad version of the Comic Zeal iPhone comic book reader app.

The current iPhone version is v3.2.2, and costs $3.99 on the app store. The iPad version will be Comic Zeal 4, a separate purchase (no price given in the blog), and iPad-only to start (but will eventually be retrofitted to work with the iPhone, too).

The blog post has plenty of nice-looking pictures (taken using the iPad simulator) and talks about changes to the interface made necessary by the larger size of the iPad—in particular, moving most of the control buttons to the top where they could be pressed with the index finger rather than a thumb.

The reader will read CBZ, ZIP, CBR, and RAR files natively. Files are transferred using a desktop sync application, the same as with most iPhone document readers—but perhaps you will also be able to use whatever the “shared sandbox” sync method is that Apple is retrofitting into the new iPhoneOS. The blogger explains:

At the moment we can’t talk about any other options for transferring the comic files into Comic Zeal so please don’t think I’ve forgotten to mention it, I just can’t talk about it.

All in all, the app looks pretty impressive. If I had an iPad, it would be one of the first things I’d purchase. As it is, I’m tempted to shell out for the iPhone version, but I think I’ll wait until Comic Zeal 4 works with the iPhone and iPod Touch instead. (Found via BoingBoing.)

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