How to Find and Read Comic E-Books Online

Normal guys like me usually love comic books. I mean, come on, super powered babes in tight suits, which one of you guys could turn your eyes away from that? And as with everything else in our lives, comic books have also moved into e-territory - the computer and net. There are also web comics.

While nothing can beat dead tree printed comicbooks during ‘morning rituals’, reading your friendly neighborhood heroes on-screen could also be nice. Doing it on the Mac makes everything even more nicer.

Searching the Sagas

Before reading, you must first obviously have the comic books. Here are a few ways to find the electronic version of your favorites.

1. Use torrents

There are many torrent portals out there, but if you are a Demonoid member you are lucky because they have a special section dedicated to comic books.

2. Use a search engine

Any of them - cough! Google! Cough! - will do, just use the search string

-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:”index of” “Last modified” “Title” comics cbr.

Make sure that you change the “Title” into whatever title you are searching for. Additional note: ‘CBR’ is the common compression extension for electronic versions of comic books.

Other popular extensions are CBZ, ZIP, and RAR. Try changing the extensions during the search if you don’t find what you’re looking for.

3. Try online storage sites

The popularity of online storage services makes them ideal places to keep digital collections. Try searching inside some of them. If you want suggestions on lists of online storage sites, Make Use Of has covered many of them. Or better, use Rapidshare search engines.

4. IRC

This old chatting world has been and still is one of the best resources of any kind of files - comic books included. One caveat is that you have to know exactly where to look. I’m not an IRC expert so I can’t help too much on this. If you can share some knowledge, please use the comments below.

Viewing and Reading the Virtual Pages

Now comes the fun part - reading comic books online! As a Mac user, I can recommend a few reading programs which run under the Mac.

1. FFView

One of the favorite comic readers among Mac users.

2. Jomic

A Java based comic viewer. So it can run under other platforms as well. Just be sure to have Java 1.4 or later. But as with other Java apps, this one too can be a bit ‘heavy’ on older machines.

3. Sequential 2

This one is an image viewer originally designed for opening a folder of images and displaying them in order.

4. Simple Comic

This one is my personal favourite. I like the ability to view two pages of a comic. It makes you feel like you are reading the hardware version. Also the ability to get the sneak peek of pages using the thumbnail on the progress bar.

For Windows users, aside from Jomic, try Comic Rack. This app display your comic collection iTunes-style. I can’t seem to find any other better options - the same goes for Linux. But then again, maybe I didn’t search hard enough. So, does anybody have any better suggestions?