Graphic Novels in the eBook Era

One of my favourite formats to read is graphic fiction be it manga, superhero, or some other genre. Some of the best and most compelling stories written, in my opinion, are in graphic format. Unfortunately graphic fiction has not tranlated well into the eBook realm.

eBooks that come in the format of ePUB will arrange the words so that it best fits on the page regardless of what font or font-size you use. PDFs, by comparison, do not. They are static images like a photograph and if your screen is too small (as many eReaders are) the reading experience is poor.

The problem is graphic fiction, since it’s all pictures, can’t be transformed into ePUB format leaving only PDF as a possibility. This is why I generally don’t read graphic fiction in electronic format despite my love for digital and graphic fiction. (I should point out this hasn’t stopped many people from illegally downloading these works via bitTorrent and other peer-to-peer software services and reading them on iPads and other large screen tablets.)

There is hope however. Clever using of HTML and CCS somebody has figured out how to format comic images so they are resizeable. Go ahead and take a look for yourself.

Maybe I’ll be able to read my graphic fiction digitally soon after all.