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Reading purchased digital manga




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RedSwirl



Joined: 08 Feb 2006
Posts: 344
PostPosted: Mon Mar 11, 2019 5:02 pm Reply with quote
What do you guys use for digital manga outside of main online services or DRM?

I'm sure most people use stuff like CDisplay or some mobile apps (like ComicZeal or iComic), but recently I've found they don't work so well with large files.

Last year there was that Kodansha Humble Bundle where I was able to get a bunch of volumes of stuff like Alita, Seven Dealy Sins, Aijin, etc., all DRM-free and official. The problem is the files they give you are huge. They're in Tankobon and some of them are omnibuses, with each CBZ file being between 300MB and a 1.2GB. The usual reading apps don't seem to be built for files that big, and whenever I try to import them the apps just crash. Even CDisplay breaks.

So far my only solution has been to download the EPUB versions (they let you choose different file formats) and import them to Apple Books, which seems to do an okay job. The files take a minute to import but I've been able to read some, and Apple Books even knows to display the pages right to left, but it still acts sluggishly and sometimes crashes, when normal books work just fine.
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Alan45
Village Elder



Joined: 25 Aug 2010
Posts: 9812
Location: Virginia
PostPosted: Thu Mar 14, 2019 7:28 am Reply with quote
I'm not really into digital manga and have only bought a few items from Go Manga. However, what I did was download the PDF version and read it on my desktop computer. That works well for me.
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tojikomori



Joined: 08 Jan 2017
Posts: 71
Location: Minnesota
PostPosted: Tue Jun 25, 2019 7:28 pm Reply with quote
Even for omnibuses, those files are huge: amazing for archival purposes, but you could probably re-encode them at a much lower resolution for daily reading. A tool like Kindle Comic Converter could do that. Despite its name, it supports CBZ as both an input and an output format. Just make sure not to replace the high quality originals when you use it!

For reading, I have a Kobo e-reader which supports sideloading CBZ and epubs, but official DRM-free digital manga is so rare that I've only used that feature a handful of times in the ~5 years since I switched from Kindle. I buy most of my digital manga from the Kobo store.

I've also used Simple Comic on my Mac, but mostly just for testing KCC output before I put it on the Kobo. If I were using Apple products exclusively for reading, I think I'd do the same as you and stick with iBooks for the convenience.
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