Insomnic Dreams

I recently purchased a Kindle 2 and I am very, very happy with the product. I know discussions of the Kindle can spark some debates so I’m going to avoid all of those by stating “I like it but if you don’t that’s fine too”. So lets skip along happily now and discuss what I wanted to discuss with you which is specifically about reading manga on the Kindle. Yup… you can read japanese comic books on the Kindle very easily. You can also load your own images for viewing as well using the same process.

So how do we accomplish this amazing feat? Actually, very easily. The program to use is called Mangle.

Mangle does an awesome job of converting images to be optimized for the Kindle display and processed to work correctly with the navigation system of the device.

See for yourself. The following image was converted using Mangle and loaded onto my Kindle 2. The left side image is the original, the middle one is the converted, and the right side image is displaying on the Kindle 2. Click on the thumbnails to see the original sizes.

So as you can see it looks pretty darn good. You can see a couple other examples at the Mangle website.

Mangle runs as a stand alone executable so you can run it directly with no installation necessary. It’s a very basic layout so it’s very easy to use. You pick either a set of images or a directory of images, click the gear icon to get it started, tell it where to put the converted images and then it converts them for you. That’s it!

Once it’s converted, you will plug in your Kindle and create a folder on it called “pictures”. Put the new book you created (the folder with all the images) into the Pictures directory and you are all set. It should show up in your book list using the name of the folder as the title.  If you don’t see it, press Alt+Z to refresh the listing.

You can also use Mangle to convert pictures into a photo album or convert pictures to use as custom screen savers.

Yes… custom screen saver. It requires hacking the Kindle a bit but is very easy and can be reversed. Go to the Kindle 2 Screen Saver Hack wiki page at MobileRead and it will walk you through using it. The image you see above is one of my custom screen saver images.

This program works on Windows and Linux and is free to use. Feel free to post any questions and I’ll be happy to help out.

UPDATE: The Kindle 2.3 update breaks the screen saver hack. The updated version can be found at JYA’s site.

UPDATE 2: The Kindle 2.3 update has some new image viewer options. For some it has caused issues and for others it has not. If you have any issues, the new PDF support has worked pretty well for manga. IrfanView does a good job of converting the Mangle converted images to PDF (process: thumbnail viewer->select all->print to PDF using CuteWriter).

UPDATE 3: After speaking with Amazon customer service and tech support it seems the “developers” have decided that any use of the built in image viewer is considered a hack and therefore note support. After bothering them over and over about it though I was told an image viewer would be developed in a future release. I’m assuming that it will be part of the new active content  that is coming to the Kindle (think “App Store”) and the recent release of the Kindle KDK (Kindle Development Kit). This could easily mean a dedicated comic book reader as well.