Mangle Your Kindle

December 15, 2008

I got this through the comments on a previous post of mine about reading manga on the Kindle.  Of course, this isn’t for legally downloaded manga, becasue…..there isn’t any!  But if you read and enjoy scanalations, which manga publishers obviously don’t consider a threat or care do anything about, here’s a new solution for reading them on the Kindle.

Mangle is open source software that makes organizing and reading manga on the Kindle easier.  It was created by Alex Yatskov, a manga reader with one of those imaginary Kindles Michael Gambos keeps asking to see.  He did what I couldn’t do; play around with the Kindle and it’s “undocumented features” and got scanalations working on his.  Of course because these are not official features, there were problems.  See the link for details.  But, being an enterprising gentleman, he set to work to create software to fix them.  The site includes download links, instructions and screenshots.

It’s really sad that we have to rely open source and borderline pirates to get manga in a digital format.  But as long as publishers refuse to do anything about it, I’m glad there are people like Alex and the other sites that make online manga easy to access and read.  These people prove it’s not impossible, just that publishers are lazy.

4 Comments

  • Wes February 10, 2010 at 1:48 pm

    “It’s really sad that we have to rely open source and borderline pirates to get manga in a digital format.” I have to wonder what’s wrong with open source, did you mean free/open is bad?

    • Lori Henderson February 10, 2010 at 6:29 pm

      No, there’s nothing wrong with free or open source. What I’m lamenting is the fact that device creators like Amazon and Sony DON’T make it easy to read comics on their devices. Readers who want to do so have to rely on third parties to get the features they want. Amazon should have come with an image viewer, not buried in the root code. While I am glad there are programmers that are willing to write software like Mangle that let you read manga on the Kindle, I’m saddened that Amazon didn’t think doing it first.

  • Hayley Morris April 7, 2011 at 11:27 am

    don’t suppose you know what happened to the mangle site, I can’t find the download anywhere. Amazon got worried?

    • Lori Henderson April 9, 2011 at 1:22 am

      I got to the site just fine by clicking on the link in the article. Downloads were half way down and seemed to work just fine. Maybe there was mainenance.

      I don’t think Amazon is worried about Mangle. The core audience for the Kindle propbly doesn’t read manga, or would be techie enough to do the rooting that needs to be done to make it work.

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