Emily VanBuren is a PhD student in history at Northwestern University. You can find her on Twitter at or at her blog,.Summer is just around the corner, and I’ve been drawing up a list of all the things I’d like to accomplish before next academic year. It’s a fine time to relax, to step back and reassess my existing workflow, and to reorganize. One of the projects I’m trying this summer?
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Cataloging my own library.Do you ever spend too long looking for a book that you just know you already have? Have you ever accidentally purchased a book twice? Sadly, I can answer “yes” to both of these questions.
Download Comic Book Collector Database and enjoy it on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. . Also look for our apps on the iPad!. Quickly catalog, filter, sort, and manage all of the comic books you own, including Marvel, DC, Image, IDW, Disney, and more. CDisplay Ex is a light, efficient and Free CBR Reader, and it is also the most popular comic book reader. It is able to read all comic book formats (.cbr file,. Cbz,.pdf, etc.) and Manga. Everything is designed to give you the best comic reading experience, it load comic books.
One of my problems is that I can never remember if I own a particular book, or if I’ve just checked it out of the library frequently enough that I think it’s a permanent fixture in my personal collection. I also often struggle to remember if I own a book in hard copy or Kindle form. And one of my least favorite feelings is when I know that I’ve loaned a book to a friend or colleague, but I’m unable to remember which person borrowed it or when.So, inspired by fellow GradHacker Justin Dunnavant’s post on, I’ve decided that it’s time to reorganize my own collection of books.
My requirements: must be an iOS-friendly app, must be less than $5, and must allow me to track borrowing. Here are a few of the contenders I’ve been considering, for any of you who might be interested in doing the same:1.: This app allows you to organize your books (plus movies, music, etc.) via tags. I like the built-in annotation features (which could allow you to make notes about borrowing), and the basically limitless size (up to 100,000 items). This app also includes tools for measuring how much you’ve read, as well as the options to review items in your library and to make those reviews public. Web, iOS, or Android.2.: I like this app because with its built-in borrowing status for every item, it lends itself well to tracking the current location/guardian of each book. I also appreciate the barcode scanning feature for easy use, and the fact that this app automatically calls up available info on each book by the ISBN you enter. IPhone or iPad.3.: This is a very basic cataloging app, which allows you to input simple information about each item (author, title, publisher, year, ISBN, simple annotation).
Its features are pretty limited, but that’s what makes it so easy to learn. I haven’t yet figured out a trick for tracking book lending in this app. IPhone, iPad, & iPod touch.4.: This one strikes me as being very similar to iBookshelf. You can input information via barcode scanning or ISBN, and it allows you to catalog all kinds of media (not just books). It also has built-in features for tracking borrowing/loans, allows you to rate items, features streamlined backup options, and can handle up to about 8,000 items at a time. IPhone, iPad, & iPod touch.5.: I started looking at this tool because it boasted its status as the highest-rated book database app in iTunes. Again, this is another app that allows input via ISBN or barcode scanning, and it automatically generates associated information (including basics like title and author, but also Goodreads reviews) for each item.
I also appreciate that this app is specifically designed to export to Dropbox for easy backup. IPhone, iPad, iPod touch, & Mac desktop.6.: This app not only allows you to catalogue and track the loan status for each item in your library, but it also allows you to send “polite reminders to friends who haven’t returned your books.” It also accommodates wishlists. I like that this one allows you to easily track the books that you’ve checked out from the library, and that it sends you reminders before they’re due (farewell, late fees). IPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Android, and Mac OS X.7.: Key features in this app include barcode scanning or manual UPC/ISBN entry, automatic cover art and bibliographic information (via Google spidering), genre sorting, tracking loans and borrowing, wishlists, and preorder cataloging. IPhone, iPad, & iPod touch.I haven’t decided which app I’ll choose just yet (though I’m leaning toward Home Library), but comparing their features side-by-side has been helpful in thinking about what exactly I need this tool to do.How do you keep track of all of the items in your home library? Have you tried any of these apps?Image by Flickr user used under creative commons licensing.
This is part one of a two-part series about how to create and publish a comic book or graphic novel on your Mac.Years ago I used my Mac and the services at my local copy shop to create small print runs of comic books to sell at comic conventions. Times have changed, but there’s still something to be said for making comics the old-fashioned way, with ink on paper.
Using your Mac and some additional hardware and software, you can create your own comic books and graphic novels that look good without breaking the bank. In this first of two articles, I’ll discuss the materials you’ll need, how to scan your artwork into your Mac, and how to make those scans look their best.
Plan your project and gather equipmentA look at the sample projects in your local copy shop will tell you the sky’s the limit in desktop publishing, but some options are more economical than others. I wanted my comics to be inexpensive to produce, so I created 24 pages of black-and-white art printed double-sided on standard letter-size paper. These pages were then folded and stapled to make a 5.5-by-8.5-inch booklet. You can expect to pay roughly $100 for 100 booklets made this way, but prices will vary. If your budget is higher, extra features like trimming, different paper stocks, and even color printing can improve the look of your final product. I’ll talk about those in greater detail in the next article.Besides your Mac and the original artwork, you’ll need a scanner to import your artwork into your computer. Almost any highly rated letter-size flatbed scanner capable of capturing 300 pixels per inch will do.
You’ll also need an image editor like Photoshop or Pixelmator to clean up and style your scanned images, and a page-layout application like InDesign, Pages ’09, or Word ’11 to assemble your scanned artwork into a book.You don’t have to spend a lot of money to create eye-catching comic books and graphic novels. Prepare, reduce, and scan your artworkMy original art consisted of ink drawings at 10-by-15 inches. Your art might be in a different medium at different dimensions, but I’d recommend working smaller than 11-by-17 inches so you can reduce it with a standard photocopier to fit a letter-size scanner. No matter the size, thoroughly erase any guidelines or other stray marks before you begin shrinking or scanning. You want to keep as many of these blemishes as possible out of your digital files.Adjusting the Levels control is an easy way to make your black and white scans look their best.To reduce the size your artwork inexpensively, use a photocopier with clean scanning glass. Place your artwork flush with the photocopier’s positioning guides, and reduce it to fill a sheet of letter-size paper. I reduced my art by 64 percent, but you may need to experiment for the best proportions.
You’ll apply this percentage to all your pages, so make a note of it.Before reducing all of your artwork, make test copies experimenting with different brightness and contrast settings. You want to find the setting that most closely preserves the artwork's original appearance without lightening or darkening the image. When you find the setting that works best, make a note of it, and then use it to make reduced copies of all your original art. Copying onto standard white inkjet or copier paper works fine.With letter-size copies of your artwork, you’re ready to begin scanning. Set your scanning program’s image type to grayscale with a resolution of 300 pixels per inch.
This will give you the image quality you need for printing on typical laser printers without creating unwieldy file sizes. Create a folder on your Mac, and scan your photocopies to it, saving them as LZW-compressed TIFF files with descriptive names. These should tell you the project the scan is associated with and its page number in your final comic book. It’s good practice to start these names with a two-digit page number (such as “01-MyComicBookName.tif”) to make it easy to identify the matching file for a given page in your layout application’s image import menu.
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Enhance your scans and add effectsEven sharp scans of the best photocopies will benefit from fine-tuning in your image editor. To get started, open your first scanned page and straighten any accidental skewing that may have occurred during copying and scanning, then crop tightly around your artwork.Next, enhance your artwork by adjusting its shadows, highlights, and midtones with the Levels feature.
If you’re scanning line art, you’ll mostly use the shadow and highlight sliders to get deep blacks and bright whites, respectively. Most toned artwork, like pencil drawings, can be enhanced with many of the same controls you’d use for enhancing photos, such as Levels, Brightness, and Contrast. When your picture looks right, you can start using the eraser and paintbrush tools to remove or draw over any blemishes that haven’t already disappeared.
Repeat these steps for all your artwork, and remember that because it will print at a fairly small size, you don’t need to fix every little flaw you find.Color printing is expensive, but grayscale tones can make your line art look striking for less money.With a clean scan, you can now copy and paste sections of your artwork, rotate and flip entire panels, or apply filters for unique effects. You can even save time by drawing large areas of black, like shadows or night skies, with a Fill or Paintbrush tool instead of ink on paper. For greater visual interest, you can add grayscale tones to black-and-white line art with an image editor that supports layers.
Just create a new layer beneath your line art, and set the line art level’s blending mode to Multiply. Set your Paintbrush to a gray tone, and select the new layer and draw.
The tones will fill the white areas of your artwork without damaging the original scan. Note that these images will need to be saved in your image-editor’s native file format, then flattened and re-saved as TIFFs to import into your page-layout application.That should be more than enough to keep you busy until tomorrow, when I’ll talk about assembling your polished image files in a single document, adding text to your pages, and producing a finished file for your copy shop. Adam Berenstain is a freelance writer and comic book artist in upstate New York.
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