ComicBookLover 1.0


Bitcartel Software
Price: $24.99 (free demo)

Pros: Your entire comic collection on your Mac, familiar interface, flexible view settings.
Cons: Keyboard controls could be simpler and the app lacks a little polish.


comicbooklover-logo

by Gerrit Dalman, 1st Lt, USAF


When I was younger I was an avid comic book collector. Now I own a sizable collection that I keep safe and secure like any good investment. The down side is that I never get to read them anymore! Thanks to ComicBookLover I now have a way to enjoy my favorites any time anywhere without degrading their value or lugging a huge pile with me.

ComicBookLover is the solution for organizing and enjoying your electronic comic collection on the Mac. With a familiar iLife-inspired interface it is to your comic books what iTunes is to your music - minus the store of course!

With support for the popular .cbr and .cbz comic formats as well as PDFs and image folders, just about any comic you can find on the internet or scan in yourself can be added to the library. While you still have to file those documents yourself, once imported, CBL can find them anywhere on your drive.

Browser
Looking a lot like iTunes, the main window lets you search for comics; browse them by genre, publisher, or series; and create lists and smart lists to organize your collection. There's a handy cover preview for the selected issue, but if you're really visually-oriented and that's not enough, you can open a resizable pane and browse your titles by their covers (a lot like Delicious Library).

Full Screen
Double-clicking on any issue will open it in a reading view. CBL offers up plenty of options for maximizing your enjoyment of each title. You can read one-up or with facing pages, rotate the book, adjust the zoom, and even read in reverse order for manga. Best of all, the app remembers your settings for each comic individually, including what page you were on. Real comics were never this user-friendly!

Thanks to the PDF support (which is unfortunately a little buggy), CBL can even pull double duty as a library for downloadable texts. It contains many of the drool-worthy features hinted at in the iBrary rumors of old, making your Mac a descent eBook if you like.

Color Correction
But with features like comic-wide color correction and detailed meta-data fields, this app is clearly focused on the comic collecting experience. The personal ratings and info like publisher, date, and number are useful for organizing your collection, but it's too bad they are only for your reference. There's no standard meta-data format, so you can't share it and you will never import a comic with that information filled-in; you've got to do it yourself each time. In fact, there isn't even a handy way to export or print a database of that information for documenting your collection.

While little things occasionally seem to be missing from this program, its still pretty well featured for a 1.0 release. Besides, there's no arguing that ComicBookLover is the solution for organizing and enjoying your comics on a Mac. The only hard part is finding digital version of your issues online.

If you like comic books and want to be able to read them on deployments, while traveling, or just at home without opening them, download ComicBookLover and find a whole new way to enjoy the rich world of comics.


System Requirements:
* Mac OS X 10.4 or later