Those who have tried to search for internet comics to download and digital comics, may have found themselves with files of the CBR or CBZ type, which are the standard formats of the comics to be read via a PC or smartphone. The .cbz and .cbr files are nothing more than archive files, they are practically identical, respectively, to the .ZIP and .RAR files.
The only difference is that inside they contain images and that, if they are open with the right program, you can get a vertical reading as if you were reading an ebook or a pdf.
The idea of using a special comic book extension dates back, according to what I found, to 1990 from the creator of the CDisplay program.
This CDisplay, which still remains the free recommended program to open CBR and CBZ files, is a simple image browsing program that has the characteristic of facilitating the reading of comics and books by placing the pages in sequence.
Since then, the CBZ and CBR extensions have become the identifying ones of comics, manga and digital comics and using a program that orders comic images instead of a normal image viewer makes reading much more pleasant and fluid on the computer.
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To read Webcomics and comics downloaded from the Internet in CBZ or CBR format, you can then download and install on the PC the CDisplay program, which is free, very simple and which automatically recognizes this type of file.
Other newer and more advanced programs to read comics on PC and Mac and open CBZ and CBR files are:
- ComicRack, a free feature-rich comic reader for Windows.
The application supports all comic files and also the display of images placed in ZIP, RAR, 7z and other archives.
With this program you can also organize comics in collections.
- MComix, an alternative and simple open source program to read comics and open CBR and CBZ
- SimpleComic for Mac
- Astonishing Comic Reader, a comic book reader on Chrome.
The Caliber program is also excellent, the best for reading ebooks on PC
On Android smartphones and tablets you can use the Perfect Viewer app to open CBR and CBZ files and read comics or manga or digital comics or the Astonishing Comic Reader app, the Android version of the same Chrome app mentioned above.
On iPhone and iPad we can instead use, to open comics and read CBR and CBZ, the Cloudreader or iComix apps or, only for iPad, Comicflow
At this point you could also think of creating CBZ or CBR files to put images in order and be able to see them in sequence, as if they were part of a comic.
This idea can be an alternative to photo slideshow presentations, to package a series of images so that you can always see them in the same order.
To create a CBZ file just install a program like 7Zip and save a folder with numbered images inside creating a .zip archive.
You can then rename the .zip file to .cbz and open it with the CDisplay program or one of the others seen above.
To create a CBR file, instead, use the WinRAR program and create a .rar archive and rename the file by changing the extension from .rar to .cbr.
READ ALSO: How to see file extensions, change them and rename them
