I’ve been checking out a comic book reader for the Macintosh and have been looking at “Simple Comic” which claims to be able to read CBZ and CBR formats. I’ve been saving many of my comix as a simple PDF format. The Mac’s and iOS have stock software that easily works in the PDF format as well as EPub.

I know that these CBZ (ZIP) and CBR (RAR) are using the types of archiving systems to make those files smaller and easy to upload/download.

Do any of you guys read or work in these types of comic formats? Perhaps this isn’t something that I need to bother with. Thanks.

— Rick

I use ComicRack. It's great; almost as good as reading a physical book. I'm on a PC though.

I think that's older types of archiving…
I haven't heard of reading comics in those formats O_O

I mean, obviously PDFs are pretty common and a lot of people sell their digital versions of their comics in that format, and compression files aren't unusual, but archiving comics that way is something I think was done a bit earlier.

Are you talking about looking at older comics or mainly published paper commercial comics that have been produced in that way? Because it sounds like the cludgey approach old media takes, no offence!

I just unpack them using 7zip and read them as single images, not as clean and tidy as pdf when but a lot of times I get a better images clarity (I have no idea why some posters upload Hidef cbz files but low rez pdfs).

Furwerk studio wrote:
I have no idea why some posters upload Hidef cbz files but low rez pdfs.

It might be because PDFs are often bad with raster images and end up with a file size that's way too large so to combat it people increase the compression.

That is very true.

(Yells in frustrated publishing).