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John C:

--- Quote from: vaillant on March 12, 2012, 12:55:52 PM ---Personally, I consider eBooks and generally onscreen reading as a mere tool, because if a book (or a comic book) is worthy it needs to be printed and to be read. Onscreen reading is not reading, for many reasons.

--- End quote ---

Keep in mind that this isn't a permanent state.  Nobody (of relevance) believes that music can only be appreciated when played in person anymore, nor that it must be stored on an analog medium like tracks through vinyl, nor even that it needs to carry the full frequency range that humans can hear.  Heck, MP3 is demonstrably worse than any other way of listening to music, and it turns out that nobody actually cares.

Don't get me wrong, I love my smelly, heavy paper books, both the comic and text-based varieties.  But the only non-nostalgic difference between them is that my monitor is harder to stare at than paper...but there's a lot of smart people fixing that as we speak.

Whale:
Hi,

thanks for the response vaillant.


--- Quote ---As for the artists' credit, I find more convenient to research them, as the need arises, and transcribe them in a separate text file.

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In the future I plan to implement a library that will be based on the meta-data present in the comic books. If that meta-data information is present it is then very easy to import those comic books into the library with just a mouse click. You can then view and browse the library, sort and filter the comics based on different criteria, search in the meta-data etc. Depends on how good the implementation and possibilities are. Export of the whole library to a text file can be implemented as well if someone prefers it that way. And, BTW, one of the meta-data tags is "DatabaseRef" which references some open comic book database (e.g. Grand Comics Database) and if program is smart enough it can update the information about particular comic book after querying that database when online.


--- Quote ---I enjoy having high-resolution scans when the comic is too expensive, or when I just wish to have a look at them for comparision, but I see books and eBooks as two specific different things, with specific different aims. There is not the kind of difference there was, say, between a manuscript or a hand-produced book and an inkunabula. An eBook, or an etext, is something which is helpful for study, but it has no physical form, so it can’t be compared to a physical product.

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Lots have already been written about e-books vs. paper books and everyone has some preferences for one or another. I personally prefer e-books, they are more practical (I can read them in bed at night without having to turn on the light for example). In fact, I have not read a paper book in the last couple of years :-)


--- Quote ---Said all this, I think it would be a worthy effort what you are doing, since CBR and CBZ actually aren’t proper formats at all. From what I get, are just variant formats of a compressed ZIP file. :)

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Yep, CBR/CBZ are just compressed zip files, but since they are so common and they are so easy to create (people are lazy after all  :P) I decided to make ACBF CBZ-compatible which is good thing. I have also a lot of comic books in CBZ and I'm lazy too to fill in the meta-data too (that GCD database reference will be a killer feature ;D).

vaillant:
It’s not just a question of preference, but of phisicality.
First, you have to depend on a technology, and an advanced technology. As of now, without a device you have no book: just a set of data.
Secondarily, even when a technology becomes transparent, is not like a physical object.

Without electricity you could still produce a book. Of course, without electricity we wouldn’t be here talking at an ocean's distance, but you’d still be able to read. And there are a lot of other substantial issues, regarding *how* a book is read, and how it affects the way you read.

permpoom:
I'm struggling with formats myself. I am totally sold on the iPad as a comic reading device. The new iPad with its retina display is like looking at a printed book... not just a comic book printed on pulp, but high quality printing. I digitized some engravings by Dore from a book from the 1840s and they looked better than the original. I could zoom in and examine details that I could never see without a magnifying glass on the printed page. I want to publish picture books in this format.

The problem is the file formats and distribution networks... The epub format used in Apple's bookstore is designed for text, not images. Amazon uses PDF format, which does everything one would want, but they limit file sizes to 50 MB, which limits the number of full page images considerably. Lulu accepts PDFs up to 500 MB. That seems to be the best I've found so far.

The CBR format just doesn't work for what I want to do. I need blocks of text giving context to the images. Converting all that text to JPEGs at a decent resolution would bloat a 200 page book up too much, and it would slow down switching between pages. It's fine for straight scans of a comic book, but I want to create digital coffee table books.

At this point, I'm experimenting with PDFs and trying to come up with a code of best practices for publishing coffee table e-picture books. I'll probably start by distributing them directly from my own site, but it would be great if some of the e-book stores would take the next logical step.

Has anyone else tried anything like this?

Yoc:
Sounds very exciting PP.  Sorry I can't help with any personal experience but I wish you the best on this.
If you'd like to share a preview of anything and get opinions please feel free to post a link here.

Good luck!
-Yoc

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