[Sabardeyn]

CBR literally stands for "Comic Book RAR", an archived series of images of comic books, manga, graphic novels or whatever you want to call the general idea of a graphic storyline. While archives of images predates PDF, an image-only PDF (no text at all, no other file types or data included) is probably the closest and best known comparison.

With the manga files I've seen, there are no other file types inside the archive except images (usually jpg, png, or svg). What would be considered metadata (author, title, isbn, etc) is a picture of data, not text. Perhaps publishers who have started to embrace digital distribution are including non-image metadata? If they are, I'm not aware of it - but I'm not looking either, so I would have easily missed it.

I recall Manga Meeya, a CBR reader program, had a preference setting to force the display of an included text file over all other content. This caused the text to be displayed and never allowed me to "change the page" to any of the included images. Turning off the checkbox resolved the problem. This occurred with only one manga archive, ever.