[morgancooper]

I've tried reading some manga on my Kobo Touch and it works fairly well. I have manga in jpg/png format in zip/rar archives and renamed them to cbz/cbr. I've loaded them directly on the device as well as loaded them on a microSD. There's no noticeable difference in either methods and pages turned in less than half a second for grayscale images and maybe a whole second for pages that were in full colour. I tried entire tankoubons as well as individual chapters to see if there would be a difference in speed and found none.

I haven't tried manga in pdf, epub, rtf (can you even do that?), jpg, zip/rar. But cbz/cbr work fine. One thing I need to try is to see if Kobo will recognize the file if the filename had Japanese text (hiragana, katakana, kanji), but I'm not too worried since I have most of my manga files in english letters (romaji).

I'd say that I've spent less than two whole hours loading and flipping through manga on the Kobo and I'm quite satisfied with its capabilities, but right now I'm really focused on reading a series of books so I haven't really tested its comic reading ability.

One bad experience I've had with the Kobo was when I loaded about 1GB of about two dozen poorly formatted cbz/cbr files on a microSD. There were a few archives that had pdf files instead of jpg/png and the Kobo crashed as it scanned what was on the microSD during startup. I think the problem was due to poor formatting of the files or having a few archives that had pdf files in them and not because it crashed processing too many files. I hope anyways. I'll have to try loading a whole bunch of proper cbz/cbr next time.

Another thing that I would like changed is the ability to delete files on the microSD on the device. I'm not sure if a firmware update has changed this, but the version I had allowed me to delete the files, but restarting device restored them to my library. It was bothersome because I had to remember which chapters I had finished when I went back to continue reading.

Overall, it's a good device for both reading comics and books, but as it's still a newish technology there is plenty of room for improvement. That's just how technology works though.

Edit: One more thing. The zoom function isn't very useful. I had certain comics where the words were very small and I had to squint to read them. Zooming in just stretches the image larger, but doesn't redraw the image to make the words clearer. I'm not sure if it's just the original file that is small or the zoom function is a simple/crappy one. So make sure you have good eyes or you're loading comics with decent font size.