Does anyone have any suggestions for manga reading on the iPad?

I've heard of:

Comic Zeal
Comic Reader Mobi (supposedly pulled from the App Store)
Cloudreaders (FREE!)
Comic Book Lover
iComic

I will likely get my iPad in a few days (64GB Wifi, not getting the 3G ipad since
my 3G android phone supports wifi tethering).

Maybe there are some other good comic reading apps that I don't know about.
I'm leaning towards CloudReaders because it supposedly supports wifi transfer
of comics on jailbroken iPads.

I have no interest in the iFad, but I'd like to know where I can find [untranslated] manga in electronic form.

shadysaint Wrote:I have no interest in the iFad, but I'd like to know where I can find [untranslated] manga in electronic form.

I was going to say mangahelpers, but they removed all links to raw manga recently.
Ouch. It hurts like crazy.

rawscans is another good place.
But doesn't really compare to mangahelpers (unless other people have suggestions).

I use iComic on the iPhone and it's very good - I prefer the controls to most other readers. I tried all the free readers on the app store and they weren't as intuitive to use. Perhaps Cloudreaders is different though - since it's free you might as well try it first.

Rawscans.com is good for less famous manga, TPB for the famous stuff.

Nyaatorrents is good for both famous and less well known stuff.

shadysaint Wrote:I have no interest in the iFad, but I'd like to know where I can find [untranslated] manga in electronic form.

Why go through the whole process of opening a thread, reading it, and then coming up with a response just to shit on the topic and try to spin its readers off on a tangent?

Posts like this waste your time and mine.

The iPad is a wonderful comics reader! The picture quality is superb, and the screen size is large enough so that you can really enjoy the art. But the two apps I currently use don't involve manga. One is the marvelous Marvel Comics app. The other is the Star Trek comics app. Both those apps are free, and they have their own stores with free and paid comics. But as much as I've looked, I can't find something similar for the iPad -- something that lets you shop for manga directly through the app itself. Instead, the current options are like those listed in the original post -- readers that work fine, but require you to get the manga on your PC or Mac and then transfer it to the iPad. As I'm a bit fussy about complying with copyright law, I haven't explored this option yet. I'd rather just pay for manga through an app, the way the Marvel and Trek apps work.

Another option is to buy manga through the eBooks or Kindle stores. The eBooks store doesn't have much, but the Kindle store has a lot of stuff, including some in Japanese. (The Kindle app for iPad is free.) Much of this is lame romance or eroge, but some of it is interesting.

There are also some "apps" in the app store that are actually manga e-books in Japanese, some of which are free -- but again, the free ones are typically Harlequin romances and things like that.

I just drop them into iBunkoHD. It's easily the best all-around reader for the iPad, especially if your focus is things that are in Japanese. Plus it supports all those wacky wi-fi transfer methods, if you're for some reason opposed to just using the USB transfer through iTunes.

chamcham Wrote:

shadysaint Wrote:I have no interest in the iFad, but I'd like to know where I can find [untranslated] manga in electronic form.

I was going to say mangahelpers, but they removed all links to raw manga recently.
Ouch. It hurts like crazy.

rawscans is another good place.
But doesn't really compare to mangahelpers (unless other people have suggestions).

They did what!? God damnit, that was the perfect resource for manga.

Mcjon01 Wrote:I just drop them into iBunkoHD. It's easily the best all-around reader for the iPad, especially if your focus is things that are in Japanese. Plus it supports all those wacky wi-fi transfer methods, if you're for some reason opposed to just using the USB transfer through iTunes.

How is iBunkoHD? I plan to buy it when I can get to Japan to get an iTunes card. Do they have a store or something you can purchase books from them? Or do they have a large collection of free stuff?

As for a comic reader, check out ComicGlass in the Japan store for free. It's a super good native Japanese comic and picture reader. For example, I have a bunch of shousetsu in jpg form on my computer. All I have to do is zip them, throw them on ComicGlass and view them at my leisure.

It displays manga very well, too.

Ryuujin27 Wrote:How is iBunkoHD? I plan to buy it when I can get to Japan to get an iTunes card. Do they have a store or something you can purchase books from them? Or do they have a large collection of free stuff?

As for a comic reader, check out ComicGlass in the Japan store for free. It's a super good native Japanese comic and picture reader. For example, I have a bunch of shousetsu in jpg form on my computer. All I have to do is zip them, throw them on ComicGlass and view them at my leisure.

It displays manga very well, too.

It's pretty great. The interface is pretty much the same as the iphone version would be if they fused it with the iPad version of iBook. But that description pretty much sucks, so it's easier just to look at the website.

There's no store, but you can download anything you want from the Aozora Bunko. Plus, with just a little bit of editing, everything in that totally innocent thread about books comes out looking great, pictures and all.

And it sounds like getting comics into the app works pretty much the same way on both ComicGlass and iBunko. I just like having everything in one place. I mean, obviously, I bought an iPad after all.

I use iComic happily. That's pretty much the reason I got an iPad. For content, you want to google for "一般コミック" or "raw manga". There are lots of sites full of rapidshare/megauload links. Get yourself a copy of jDownloader to go with them and you'll have more manga that you'll ever be able to read.

Mcjon01 Wrote:

Ryuujin27 Wrote:How is iBunkoHD? I plan to buy it when I can get to Japan to get an iTunes card. Do they have a store or something you can purchase books from them? Or do they have a large collection of free stuff?

As for a comic reader, check out ComicGlass in the Japan store for free. It's a super good native Japanese comic and picture reader. For example, I have a bunch of shousetsu in jpg form on my computer. All I have to do is zip them, throw them on ComicGlass and view them at my leisure.

It displays manga very well, too.

It's pretty great. The interface is pretty much the same as the iphone version would be if they fused it with the iPad version of iBook. But that description pretty much sucks, so it's easier just to look at the website.

There's no store, but you can download anything you want from the Aozora Bunko. Plus, with just a little bit of editing, everything in that totally innocent thread about books comes out looking great, pictures and all.

And it sounds like getting comics into the app works pretty much the same way on both ComicGlass and iBunko. I just like having everything in one place. I mean, obviously, I bought an iPad after all.

Thanks for the info! You wouldn't happen to know a place where I can view everything that Aozora Bunko has available, would you?

By author:
http://www.aozora.gr.jp/index_pages/person_all.html

By book title:
http://www.aozora.gr.jp/index_pages/person_inp_all.html

Holy cow, iBunko is great! It comes with an overwhelming selection of public-domain stuff, it seems. Thanks for the suggestion!

I use arcreader, basically just a zip reader but since most of my manga comes in zip format it works great.

I got my iPad and I'm glad to say that it's definitely life changing.
I'm happy that I didn't get an iPad on launch day, since the apps
really weren't there yet.

But they have matured to the point where the iPad is now much more useful.

Anyway, I tried CloudReaders and I'm happy with it.

To be honest, I might just write my own iPad comic viewer in the future.
I think most are especially weak in managing your comic collections. Also
the lack of popup dictionary integration, is annoying.

Depending on the scan quality, sometimes kanji are hard to read (especially
with comics like Bloody Monday which tend to be very wordy and have tiny
furigana), but that's not the iPad's fault.

I get the feeling if Apple adds the Retina display to the next generation iPad,
reading tiny kanji/furigana won't be a problem any more.

Something that shocked me is reading light novels on the iPad.

I was expecting the kanji to be very tiny when fitting the whole page
on a screen (light novels = long vertical columsn of text). But the image
quality blew me away. I would even say that reading light novels is much
easier than reading manga on the iPad. The size is perfect.

I'm also really impressed by iBunkoHD.
@mcjon21 Thanks for recommending iBunkoHD