Comic Book Heroes – The Best Readers for Mac and Windows

The Internet has brought revolution to the worlds of music and films, altering forever the commercial landscape and bringing once mighty chain stores to their knees. Books took a kicking too, but it wasn’t online sales that killed the book shops, but eBooks for devices like the Kindle and the iPad. Now that same revolution is sweeping through the world of comics – whether it will affect the already niche world of the comicbook store remains to be seen – but it is certainly opening up the world of graphic novels to a whole new audience.

There are plenty of comicbook readers available for both Windows and Mac and we’ve tried most of them. Some, like ComicBookLover for the Mac have received a fair bit of coverage on the other blogs, but we found that particular application seriously lacking in just about every way. So we’d like to introduce you to the best comicbook readers for Windows and for Mac.

Ehon – $18USD / App Store – Kaiju Software – Mac

We’ve heard the tag ‘iTunes for ebooks’ bandied around a fair bit in relation to other Mac ebook/comic readers, but none of them get as close to the reality as Ehon. As soon as you start this application it’s immediately obvious that it’s both polished and very much a Mac application. It includes both library and reader functions and works extremely well in both modes.

Ehon imported our varied library in its entirety with no issues at all. It can manage epub, PDF, CBR/RAR, CBZ/ZIP and image folders, which means it’s good for pretty much all your electronic reading needs. If you have a large library of electronic comics then you can use the SmartFolder system in combination with tags to organise your library in a logical manner.

Reading comics with Ehon is intuitive and well designed, pages can be displayed in a single or double layout and an on-screen controller enables you to flick between pages. The most natural way to use the application is to flick backwards and forwards using the arrow keys, alternatively you can navigate easily enough with trackpad or mouse, but many people prefer to flick pages with the arrow keys. The developers have said they’ll be including keyboard control in a forthcoming release, but you have to wonder why it wasn’t built in from the get-go.

Ehon’s a very cool comic book reader with seamless library support and a gorgeous Mac-styled interface. It handles large libraries and is equally adept at displayed standard eBooks as it is electronic comics. For our money this is the best comic book reader available on Mac at the present time.

ComicShelf – Free – Cyolito – Windows

It’s not often that a Windows application puts its Apple equivalents to shame, but that’s definitely the case here. While Mac comic readers like Ehon eschew complexity for a cool and simple interface, ComicShelf brings a whole new level of sophistication to the management and reading of comics without crowding out the user.

ComicShelf can read all the standard comicbook formats including cbz, zip, cbr, rar, cbt, tar, cb7, 7z, pdf and djvu. In reader mode it supports fast navigation (we loved the thumbnail overview), auto scrolling, auto rotation, dynamic zooming, automatic page fitting, magnifier, manga mode, full screen reading and dual screen support. Transitions between pages can be customised to your liking with a traditional page-turn effect or a simple fade out and in.

The library’s an understated, but extremely powerful element of the software. You can easily group comics into series and volume types according to your own preferences. It also has a search facility and smartlist functionality enabling you to sort your comics by your own highly specific criteria. If you wish, you can just browse to a book and start reading it.

Through the use of user-contributed scripts and plugins, ComicShelf is expandable and editable – for instance you can download a scraper for the Comic Vine database to ensure that your comics are all correctly tagged.  It’s an amazing bit of software, all the more so since it’s completely free.