#comic readers

For some reason, Amazon / Kindle / Comixology have two separate web-based comic readers.

Googling "Kindle Cloud Reader," clicking the green "Read Now" button on a comic's Amazon store page, or using the "Kindle Library" button in the upper left corner of the "slice reader" (see below) gets you to a reader with URLs in the format "https://read.amazon.com/manga/[content ID]"; this reader has a zoom function, a panel-by-panel Guided View mode, and fullscreening your browser (F11) actually scales the images up slightly. In addition to turning pages by clicking on the arrows on the sides of the screen, you can also can turn pages with your mouse wheel or the keyboard keys on your keyboard.

On the other hand, going through your "Content Library" from amazon.com and opening a comic by clicking its "More Actions" button and then "Read Now" will serve you your comics in a reader with URLs in the format "https://read.amazon.com/?asin=[content ID]"; this reader has no zoom function, no Guided View mode, does not scale up when you fullscreen the browser, seems to have more little delays in loading, doesn't let you turn comic pages with the mouse wheel. I call this one the "slice reader," which will make more sense in a bit.

In both readers, double-clicking a panel zooms it up to near full-screen.

The Cloud Reader is more user-friendly--but not for getting images of your comics. Sure you can take a screenshot, but it's using a "blob" renderer that is always scaling the graphics some way or other, and doesn't seem to provide the actual underlying images themselves in any easily-accessible format.

The "slice reader" loads pages a lot slower and in general feels like an older, crustier implementation that maybe they meant to replace completely with the Cloud Reader but had to keep around for some reason (or have they just kind of forgotten it comes up when accessing comics via some of their many reading buttons?), but I guess I'm glad they did because if you poke through the "slice reader's" page source code you'll find two "sliced" "jpeg" URLs per comic page, one for the top half of the comic page and the other for the bottom half; they're in what appears to be a streamed data format, but you can copy and paste them into a browser window and it'll give you an actual image; join them together in an image editing program, and you've got the base comic image. The image resolution is a lot less than you get from, say, Marvel Unlimited's web reader--DC pages 1249 pixels wide vs Marvel pages 1821 pixels wide--but at least it isn't extra blurry like it would be if you just screenshotted it from either reader.

All of this only really matters if you're trying to grab one of the smaller comic panels, really--and then you still have to be kind of picky to notice a difference--but it's the kind of thing that drives me up the wall. ; )

This was about the best I could do for a couple smallish early Batman panels from the Cloud Reader, for instance (DC's image quality in the Kindle versions of their Golden Age comic collections is rather poor 'p'):

Whereas with the images I could dig out of the "slice reader," I was able to avoid having to use Sharpen on the drawing, so after some color indexing, got cleaner, non-haloed edges:

Hippolyta: No man is allowed to set foot on amazonia

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