Manga Reader: The ugly duckling sings beautiful songs (Windows only)

Manga Reader is one ugly looking program. Cheesy icons, tacky background, nasty fonts and a terrible layout. Manga Reader won’t score any points for beauty or charm but I love it anyway. Ugly as it is, Manga Reader does a very beautiful thing. It reads your comic books in a simple, intuitive way.

Using this program is as close as you can get to reading the paper version of your comics. You get the book laid flat in front of you in two page view, complete with animated page turns. A common problem in PC based comic reading is the teensy little word bubbles. They just aren’t legible in two page view. Most comic readers solve this problem by giving you a little magnifying glass to drag around the page. Manga Reader took a different approach. You just use your scroll wheel to zoom in on the page, then move the mouse around to change the focused area. The difference is HUGE.

Download Manga Reader here and give it a shot. If you can stand to look at this puke-faced program, it will serve you well.

Complaints: Manga Reader seems to have a problem with .cbr files so you’ll need plenty of .cbz comics to enjoy it. Not a big deal as long as you’re aware of this before you encode your comics. My last gripe is that it’s only available for Windows as of right now, with no plans for a Mac or Linux version.