Manga Reader

Reading comics and manga seems like such a basic task to perform, and a lot of programs exist for this purpose. Problem is, none of them worked well for me. The alternatives I looked at seemed bloated, lacked certain features (2 page support nonexistent or lousy), or were discontinued and no longer updated.

Manga Reader is works intuitively - it will flip pages from left to right with spacebar (also supports right-to-left flipping if needed) . If you are zoomed in on the left hand page and press space, it will move the page downwards toward the end of the page, then continue to the top of the right-hand page. This seems like "no-brainer" functionality, but some apps don't seem to do it right.

Manga reader will open .CBR, .CBZ, .CBT,.MGA, .WMGA and several photo formats like JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, and WDP.

As a plus, the program looks quite excellent, with a spartan (but useful) set of options in the settings menu. The interface is powerful enough to be useful, but also remains unobtrusive.

It's a wonder this program hasn't attracted the attention it deserves. The author is enigmatic and I couldn't find much information about him/her on the site it's hosted on.

The downsides - windows only, and if you're running XP you'll need to download and install .Net framework 3.5. Of course most people running XP should have that installed already. Also, the author hasn't updated the program for a full year now.

Overall this program is excellent and highly recommended.