Yen Press on the iPad?

That thunderous noise you hear is the sound of wallets worldwide being cracked open for Apple’s latest gadget, the iPad, announced earlier today. (No, not that iPad.) It’s a touch-screen computer with the power of a laptop but the interface of an iPhone, and it’s dangerously affordable. One of its main applications is iBooks, an e-book reader with integrated bookstore, and one of the companies announced to be on board from launch is Hachette, the parent company of Yen Press.

So hooray! Comics on the iPad! Right? Well, not so fast. iBooks will be using the non-proprietary EPUB format for its content, which Hachette is apparently already selling its books in - though I’m having a hard time finding details about this on the interwebs besides blustery press releases. However, word on the street is that the EPUB format is great for text-heavy work, but not so great for publications which require precise placement of text around or over artwork - like comics. This article provides an example of a broken comic in EPUB format, though the images appear to be missing at least at the moment - but we can surmise from the text that it’s a mess. And that aside, I can’t find any evidence that Hachette has even attempted to publish any of its comic content via EPUB.

Though I’m still skeptical about the desirability of reading a comic on a screen, I’m hopeful that a workaround may be found. The EPUB format appears to permit images in the SVG format, an interchangeable vector graphics format which should permit precise text and graphics formatting; though the fact that this means that every page will in fact be a large and potentially complex vector image may cause poor performance from e-reader software. And it appears that Apple does not intend to prohibit alternative e-reader programs from being available in its iPad application store; there are a couple similar programs available for the iPhone and iPod touch already available, so it may be possible that an alternative e-reader program specifically designed for comic material may be made available. I’ll keep a (skeptical) eye on the situation.