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E-readers for comic book viewing
August 19, 2008 | 10:50 am
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By David Rothman
No, E Ink can’t render manga and other comics in color, and other challenges remain. But the iPhone offers colorful viewing.
So what are the prospects of e-readers for comic viewing?
Laura Hudson, senior editor at the Comic Foundry and a writer for PW Comics Week, has a nice overview in PW.
Meanwhile I continue to hope that Wowio, a supplier of free and for-free comics, will heed my suggestion to tone down its intrusive advertising.
Related: ClickWheel‘s comics viewing tech for the iPhone/Touch (screenshot). Check it out and share your thoughts!
Technorati Tags: iPhone,iPod Touch
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Comments:
Japanese manga is usually monochrome.
Japanese Manga Comes To The iPhone
http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/08/09/japanese-manga-comes-to-the-iphone/
And comics on iPhone:
Comic Books (Almost) Come To iPhone
http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/comic-books-almost-come-to-iphone/
Glad to see others are waking up too.
Printing costs escalate when 4-color is brought in, but the same doesn’t apply for digital comics. Digital gadgets are very popular in Japan, as are video game consoles. Both Sony and MicroSoft have online gaming communities built around the PS3 and XBox360, so I wonder:
- How long before all manga are done in color, with grayscale versions for the ‘unfortunates who can only read print versions’?
- How long before comics are distributed via the online gaming consoles, and viewed on HDTVs at very-high resolutions, with potential for zooming in and out and navigating with the console controllers?
6″ e-ink devices could easily display manga. I’ve read a few manga myself on such devices.
What we need is also the right format to handle these manga: ePub could work perfectly for this (no need to convert the images since ePub supports PNG/JPEG/GIF) as long as we change the specs to allow any OPS Core Media in the OPF file instead of OPS Documents only.
We’ve discussed this several times already and there’s another area where this would be useful: covers.