CBZ → EPUB
CBZ to EPUB
A comic archive is a ZIP of pictures with no metadata and no declared reading order. An EPUB has both, which is why a converted comic behaves properly in a reader that has never heard of CBZ.
No upload· Files are read in this tab and never sent anywhere
Intake
Drop comic archives here
Output format
EPUB — The open standard. Reflows to any screen, and read by everything except Kindle hardware.
What is inferred, and how
- Page order comes from a natural sort of the filenames, so page 10 follows page 9.
- The cover is the first page. There is no other signal in a CBZ, and it is right almost always.
- Metadata is read from ComicInfo.xml when the archive has one — series, number, writer, publisher, year, summary, and whether it reads right to left.
- The contents list gets every tenth page rather than all of them. A list with four hundred entries is not navigation.
The output
A fixed-layout EPUB. Each page is one image scaled to fit the screen, and the reader’s font controls are switched off because there is no text to reflow. Page images are copied across untouched — the archive is a container, so there is nothing to re-encode.
Entries that have an image extension but are not images — a stray text file, a broken download — are skipped and counted, rather than becoming blank pages.
CBR files
CBR files are compressed with RAR, which is proprietary and has no permissively licensed decoder small enough to send to a browser. Almost every comic reader can re-save a CBR as a CBZ, and a CBZ converts here without any loss — the images inside are identical.
A comic reads better as a PDF on a large screen: CBZ and images to PDF. Building a comic from loose scans instead? Images to EPUB.