A look at the Comic Zeal comic book reader on iPad

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My preferred way of reading comic books is in print. I doubt that will change. (The smell of a comic book alone is reason enough. Whenever I take a deep whiff of my old comic books, the reward center of my brain blossoms.)

That said, I'm really looking forward to reading old, previously rare comic books on an iPad. Lots of people scan out-of-print comics books and upload them to the Web, so a lifetime of free comic book reading awaits!

Here are some notes on the upcoming iPad compatible version of the comic book reader Comic Zeal:

Comic Zeal 4 is able to read CBZ,ZIP,CBR and RAR files natively. So you can just fire up SyncDocs on your PC or Mac, drag in a whole bunch of CBZ files and import them into Comic Zeal.

Comic Zeal will still need to process the comics and resize the images, although they're now 60% larger than they were before. This process is going to be optimised and tweaked once we get our hands on a real iPad. At the moment we have no idea how long it will take to process the comics and it could be that on release, using Comic Zeal Sync is still the best option.

You'll still need to use Comic Zeal Sync to read PDFs, we don't know how the iPad will deal with opening the huge PDF files that a lot of you have.

At the moment we can't talk about any other options for transferring the comic files into Comic Zeal so please don't think I've forgotten to mention it, I just can't talk about it.

Spilling the beans on Comic Zeal V4