Comic books and manga are amusingly amount the least digitizable mediums as you have the choice of good resolution but an unpleasant reading experience with lit screens on a desktop, laptop, tablet or phone and low res or lack of spreads on an e reader. Even more so when you're missing out on colour.
I find laptops (let alone phones) fairly unpleasant for anything resembling a comic. You really need a 4k monitor at least the size of a physical page. That usually implies portrait orientation, and then a second one for spreads, at which point just give up and use a large format tv. Or better yet just stick to paper.
I also have this problem with the scientific literature. Tablets let alone ereaders just don't cut it.
What I've long wished for but it doesn't seem to exist is a high resolution full color epaper tablet the size of a hardcover textbook page with a sub-second refresh time. Not live video or anything, 500 ms or so would be bearable for quickly panning around a document.
Indeed, and my kindle scribe 2022 10.3” 64 GB is bigger than a physical manga volume. I couldn’t imagine using anything smaller
Shrug. I've read comics on a 7" eReader, scientific papers on 7.8". Rarely is there a real problem IMO, occasionally color charts are a problem on my B&W reader.
I have slightly more sympathy for scientific papers due to smaller text and overall extra density but considering that it's pretty common for comic publishers themselves to release editions smaller than a typical 10.25x6.6 page, you don't really need page size (e.g., Archie's digests, every manga tankobon ever, DC Compact Comics).
I read manga on my kobo elipsa 2e (10" 227 PPI, 1404 x 1872 resolution) often and find the experience quite good. I specifically got that e-reader since it has a big e-ink screen. Manga is mostly black and white anyway and the color pages get shown in grayscale, that works relatively well. I suppose traditional comics also work well since they have black text on white background the color to grayscale may cover some detail but should definitely be readable. most color comics and manga are printed in 300 PPI.
I'm not satisfied with a grey scale screen given it doesn't work for 99% of comic books and a significant amount of manga (ghost in the shell, for example, has a large number of colour sections)
A lot of physical manga volumes reduce what would have been originally colour pages in the serialization to B&W anyways. Heck, it's verrry common for that to include the eBook edition even though it doesn't really cost them anything.
Ever experienced the bug where usb loaded kepub manga disabled bookmarks and annotations?
https://github.com/ciromattia/kcc/issues/704
KCC has a feature to combine spreads that I added, I think it works pretty well, photos in readme.
After combining you can autorotate it or not, it’s an option.