LongBox Comics

Manxome · Post by **Manxome** » Mon Mar 15, 2010 11:39 pm

Thought this might interest some people here...

The LongBox comic reader is now in public beta, meaning anyone can just download it and try it out. I believe registering an account will let you download some free comics (albeit with big watermarks), and also read any .cbr or .cbz files you happen to have from other sources.

(Note: I'm connected to the company, so you may presume me to be biased.)

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Mon Mar 15, 2010 11:49 pm

Is this going the DRM rootkit my computer?

Manxome · Post by **Manxome** » Tue Mar 16, 2010 12:04 am

I think the DRM's pretty reasonable, but I was involved in designing it, so again, bias.

It will not rootkit your computer. It will save a couple of data files under Documents and Settings (or your OS equivalent) that prove your computer is registered.

It queries some of your hardware for identifying information, to make it harder to read DRM'd files on an unregistered machine, but it only sends hashes to the server, so it's not computationally tractable for anyone at Longbox to retrieve any of the original information.

If you have multiple machines registered on the same account, you can do a simple file-copy of books between them and they'll work on all your machines, but they won't work on a machine that isn't registered.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Tue Mar 16, 2010 3:39 am

I'm not sure how much of this has already been addressed, but...

[*]The preview and search buttons don't seem to work from the Home screen.
[*]There's a limit to password length.
[*]Either symbols aren't allowed in passwords or they aren't considered as secure as using numbers.
[*]What's the deal with putting in a machine name? Can't you just deal with that server-side?

Other than that, it's a pretty handy interface. If the selection increases (which I'm sure it will), I can imagine wasting a some of money on comics when it's this convenient. Especially if I could get the rest of Fables...

Manxome · Post by **Manxome** » Tue Mar 16, 2010 4:40 am

I believe the machine name is so that you (the user) can tell which machine is which if you end up wanting to unregister a machine (from a different machine). Server-generated names wouldn't be very useful for that.

The others, I don't know off-hand.

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Fri Mar 19, 2010 10:52 pm

So I tried it the other day and I couldn't get through the registration process. It just wouldn't actually let me register. I filed it away as something to try again at a latter point and left it alone. I remembered it again today as I realized that linux has a much better cbr/cbz reader than windows. When I tried opening longbox, it would go through the splash window and then open up onto a blank black window which failed to close.

I'm on XP Pro latest sp

Manxome · Post by **Manxome** » Sat Mar 20, 2010 12:17 am

Cynic: I'm told that could be a bug in the initial release relating to using N/A as the region code (fixed now). If you tell me your username, that can be confirmed in the logs.

The LongBox Beta Forums are also up now, if you prefer to post problems there, but I can also continue forwarding information.

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Thu Apr 29, 2010 3:51 am

People at Avatar comics are talkign on their facebook page about future issues brought on by the comic book reader market.

Portability between systems such as apple and android. drm uses and such.

manxome, any of the people at your company talk at all about things like this? curious.