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How to Read Digital Comics on the ($50) Amazon Kindle Fire Tablet

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAmazon has added many great features to the Fire tablets, but it might surprise you to learn that they left one key feature out: digital comics.

Amazon owns the leading digital comics platform, Comixology, and they’ve even made it possible for you to integrate your Comixology account with your Amazon account, but as Teleread pointed out yesterday Amazon neglected to include the Comixology app on the Fire tablet.

Fortunately, you can repair this omission, and you install other digital comics apps as well.

The Comixology app can be found in the Amazon Appstore, and so can these other comic book apps:

These apps might not turn up when you search for a comic book app in the Amazon Appstore, but all of these apps can be bought through the Amazon website, and then pushed to your Fire tablet.

Comixology, Asterix, and Viz Manga only support the comics you buy from their respective stores, but other apps like ComiCat, Dokuman, and Perfect Viewer do support one or more of the open digital comics formats (CBR, CBZ, PDF, etc).

I am more of a read comics on Windows kind of person, but if I had to pick one app to recommend, it would have to ComiCat.

Yes, it costs $3, but it is also much higher rated than the free apps, and it has more features. What’s more, ComiCat even promises to support direct downloads from the various cloud services, including Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive.

But chances are, the average reader wants to read in Comixology. And so let me add a piece of advice for Comixology users.

Yesterday I got interested in trying to read my Comixology on my Fire tablet and it involved jumping through a few hoops.

First, I had to find and download the Comixology app, and then I had to use my Amazon account to log in to the app. For some byzantine reason, the app can sell me comic books through in-app purchases, but it can’t add those comics to my Amazon/Comixology account until I give it the specific login details.

Yes, Amazon’s comic book app, running on Amazon’s tablet, wanted me to log in to my Amazon account. One would think the app would take care of that for me, but no.

It took five attempts, but eventually I got it to work. My problem was the app kept showing me a white screen in place of the login screen, but eventually (after rebooting the tablet, and reinstalling the app) I was able to log in.

image by striatic

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