Comics En Epub

[Edilma Howard]

Weare looking forward to getting your feedback. We have tested many comics bought on Humble (Books), but you might have ePUB comics that might render differently. Reach us out and share them with us by DM, and we will try to fix any rendering issues.

Around 2015 I started dabbling with making epubs. My interest was in making ebook comics and being able to distribute and sell them in bookstores around the worlds. After some initial trials I ended up publishing both George Bloop and Imagined Mysteries. It was a fun experience but I got busy with other projects and put it to the side.

Fast forward to 2020 and I start working on my first all-digital full colour comic called Bored in Space. The comic itself was an experimental venture on many fronts. I wanted to make something in full colour without worrying about how I was going to eventually point it. The way I saw it I had three options

Now I just had to relearn how to make an epub. I wasn't looking forward to hand coding them. Later that would turn out to be fun, but going in I was nervous about making a rock solid file that didn't bug out on different devices.

Not only that it wasn't just making an epub, but a fixed layout epubs. Epubs are designed to be reflowable, but a comic isn't reflowable, a page is a page, and is meant to be read in the exact way the artist put it on the page. Fixed layout epubs therefore present the page in a fixed manner. Exactly what you want when it comes to comics. Because of this, finding accurate information on making fixed layout epubs proved difficult. There were two types of information I could find. Specification documents (Which I found it hard to wade through) and information on making them using InDesign.

I started thinking about Adobe InDesign as you can layout a book and export it to both PDF and fixed layout epub. I didn't have access to the software except for booking a computer at media studio in my local library. While handy, it can be difficult to pick up the necessary skills when you can't just noodle on it at home. Then I recalled that Apple pages had added fixed layout epub export around 2018, I could use that...

Throughout my own work and research over the past few years I have heard a growing number of creators and people from the community showing an interest in accessible comics. The market exists, the readers exist. Why not work to create access to all these incredible stories? The exciting part of all this is that there are already so many examples of people working hard to create accessible comics a reality. The following is a brief overview of what is happening in the publishing landscape for accessible comics.

Comic books are already multi-modal, so it makes sense to consider multi-modal solutions. This combines more than one accessibility solution into the comic for the purpose of creating a dynamic experience. Some options include: tactile graphics accompanied by digital versions with image description; digital content accompanied by files to print 3D-printed objects, and more! Robust experiences can be designed, built, and shared, and the world of comic books can become more inclusive.

The most engaging and exciting projects in accessible comics include people with lived experiences. One such exciting endeavour is the Accessible Comics for the Blind Project. This project is an ongoing collaboration at San Francisco State University between Comics Studies, the Program for Visual Impairment, and the Longmore Institute (now called The Accessible Comics Collective) to explore ways of making comics accessible for blind and low vision readers. When working with accessibility, you must include people with lived experience as it is the only way to ensure success. When it comes to accessible comics, the future is now!

While working on PDF support for Libreture, I took the opportunity to look more closely at the digital comics field. A few things popped out to me time and again about how digital comics are currently provided to readers.

CBZ/CBR

ComicBookZip/ComicBookRar - Zipped files that contain the individual pages as JPEG files. That's it. The final letter in the abbreviation (Z/R) refers to the compression format: Zip or Rar. These files usually contain no metadata, only the images.

PDF

Portable Document Format seems the perfect format for comics. Each file is a linear, page-by-page, describing visual and text elements. Again, no metadata to describe the file's contents.

ePub

This common e-book format works just as well for comics. Each page contains the same JPEG that would be included in the CBZ/R file, but with the added benefit of metadata to describe the title, author and other information.

The CBZ/R and ePub files seem to share their source material, the JPEG images. The same comic or graphics-rich book in either of these formats will usually be the same or similar file size, since they're both simply zip files containing the images.

Text-based e-books, in the common ePub or Mobi formats, tend to be around 2MB in size. If they're much larger than that, it's usually down to the book being absolutely gigantic or because it contains lots of inset images or a large cover image. Text is text and doesn't take up much space.

I have Trees #1 by Warren Ellis and Jason Howard to hand. Published by Image Comics, it was available in CBZ/R, ePub and 'High Quality' PDF formats (before Image decided to stop selling digital comics direct).

Interestingly, not only is the PDF less compressed than the awesome original artwork, but the format has its own compression methods that come into play at very large sizes,so even the largest PDF files are not much bigger than their ePub or CBZ counterparts.

There seems to be a growing problem with comic book storage and online collection management. Books and other digital media have become so large that they are effectively Too Big To Own, and many publishers have switched to subscription models where readers own nothing at all. None of that seems fair to me. Readers should be allowed to own the things they spent their hard-earned money on, to keep them in a convenient place, and to access them however they like.

Libreture supports DRM-free PDF, CBZ and CBR formats, along with ePub and Mobi e-book formats. Give it a try, and when your Free plan is full of brilliant comics, add some extra storage that suits your needs.

I need to create an epub in Japanese manga format, which can be read from right to left. By just changing the Indesign language, can I get the program to export a fixed epub that reads from right to left?

That said, I have no idea if the EPUB export feature in those versions is any different. There have been a number of users trying to export Arabic and Farsi works and having various problems, but I haven't paid attention to anything but the technical issues.

If your book is all pictures, the order of the export should not matter; simply set up all your pages in the correct order and export. I believe there's one CSS style code you can add to set the book to open and read in RTL order.

If you're actually typesetting the Japanese text around images... the whole project is going to be technically demanding until you master the various type, layout and other RTL features on top of the EPUB export issues.

A more complete discussion of your project, how you're laying it out and creating the pages, would help in giving more precise answers. But the very short answer is yes, there are RTL EPUBs and I believe most of the better readers (Calibre, Thorium) handle the format.

If you are dealing with Japanese Mangas comic book formats, may I suggest Clip Studio Paint EX instead of InDesign to prepare your epub? One of the main reasons being that the software supports Manga formats natively and allows for both left AND right binding. And exports directly to EPUB as a RTL read version.

Anyone dealing with Manga / comic publishing ought to check out Clip Studio EX. I am not saying that InDesign couldn't do this job IF you install the Japanese version, but CS EX is the industry standard for this type of work, and the entire workflow is targeted at comics and Manga / Manghua.

Another advantage is that we can work directly with bitmap painting and editing tools in the app itself and there is no need for an external image editor. Also easier to edit and clean up comic line art. And obviously there are specific text balloon and other comic editing tools that InDesign lacks.

I know @manal shanableh have made so much effort in figuring how to tackle RTL e-PUB issues. Perhaps she can lend a hand here. I also agree with James that you need to try the ME version of Adobe InDesign if you have RTL publication.

@EmbyEbookReaderAs @GrimReapernoted an Ebook reader is underway. I have already written and tested the code in JavaScript and need to transfer it to the @Cheesegeezerplugin that he created for Javascript programmers. Now you know that many people are working on this, but we all have other duties. If you are a programmer, I would be more than happy to send you the javascript code. I use it to read Ebooks in Emby via my Emby Tool. You can do the same. The tool is attached below. Just unzip it and click on tool2.html. Signon to your server, then navigate to your ebooks and click on an e-book to read.

No, I just implemented epub. The CBR format is trivial and easy to do. I didn't implement it because it uses RAR compression rather than zip. I had good JS code for zip but not for rar. I know that open source code is available, but I ran out of time. You might give it a go yourself. It's easy to do. At the moment @Cheesegeezerand myself are busy trying to finish the bulky plugin for bulk editing emby metadata. Look for it in the plugin library soon.

Ok I will take a look at this. I was not aware that Emby was an open source project where individual contributors could create new source code for their own readers, this is a total shocking surprise . Thank you!

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