Quote:
Originally Posted by toddos
Technically there are three de facto standards -- CBR, CBZ, and CB7 (with popularity in that order). There are plenty of readers that support some or all of those formats. There are a ton of comics available in these formats, both legal (free, out of copyright, gold and silver age comics and some newer CC-licensed comics) and illegal (everything else). What's missing is DRM for these formats and support from major publishers.
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CBR, CBZ and CB7 aren't really standards though. Basically, they're just image files (normally JPEG and PNG, with the occasional GIF) stored in RAR, ZIP and 7-zip archives respectively. There's no option for metadata (aside from, perhaps, a simple readme.txt). Page order is also an issue. Since there's no standard for page indexing, pages could be displayed willy-nilly.
For example, if I had the following page naming:
Code:
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20
While some readers are smart enough to use a natural sorting algorithm, some readers would display the pages in the following sequence:
Code:
1,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,2,20,3,4,5,6,7,8,9
There needs to be some form of standard to avoid those issues. However, these companies don't really need to create new standards when existing formats such as Mobi, ePub and PDF will work just fine. Heck, I just saw manga versions of some Harlequin romances in ePub format from our local library. Tried them out of curiosity and they actually worked pretty well in Overdrive.
It'll be quite interesting to see what format these digital comics on the Kindle will take. Didn't they just introduce a new format a while ago? Something like PDF with Amazon DRM? Can that be unDRM'ed yet?