My brother-in-law works for a company that handles licensing and republishing of a lot of comic strip publishing. Lately we’ve been discussing the issues involved with republishing such image-based content as electronic books. (After these discussions, my wife asks “How’s your sister?” and I say “Uhh, OK I guess.”) I wanted to give it a shot, and found that a Google search on public domain comics got plenty of hits.

I managed to find a pretty cool one called the Blue Beetle, and issue 2 from 1955 has panels that are all the same size, which helped me to sidestep one of the tougher comics-as-ebooks issues, so I created an epub Blue Beetle comic. In the epub version the images are all rotated horizontally, so it really is aimed at smaller devices that you can easily turn 90 degrees such as the Sony Reader and the iPhone. Tests by friends show that they look pretty good on each, although the images are based on scans of 50 year-old cheaply printed paper which probably had a high acid content, so it’s not as crisp as it might be. Text on anything but a white background is difficult to read on the iPhone.

Still, overall, it’s pretty cool. Check it out yourself and let me know what you think.

6 Comments

By Bill Trippe on April 21, 2009 11:09 AM

You are the man!

By Erio on November 11, 2009 4:31 PM

ok, i just downloaded it… As soon as i get my PRS-600 i’ll try it and let you know my opinion… thank you for the work tho =)

By Erio on November 11, 2009 4:32 PM

ok, i just downloaded it… As soon as i get my PRS-600 i’ll try it and let you know my opinion… thank you for the work tho =)

By Marc Hansen on February 12, 2010 1:09 PM

There’s an epub comic book test here if anyone wants to try it.

By Will on March 16, 2010 11:44 PM

I wrote a program to convert comic to EPUB. It’s free and open source for anyone who wants it. I was getting tired of manually converting them. :)

The program automatically converts CBR and CBZ files. It also cleans up the scanned images so that they look nicer on an eBook reader. It’s all pretty much automatic. Windows only though (sorry), but open source if anyone wants to port it.

To download it go here:
http://comictoepub.sourceforge.net/

By Bob on March 17, 2010 9:16 AM

Will: looks cool! Can you post links to some sample converted comics?