Comics and Sequential Art

This is not yet a review of the book content, but a note about the format that I hope might be helpful to other buyers since the only other review currently in the Apple Books store (from 2013) decries the formatting…

TL;DR: Try a sample, the reading experience is decent with modern versions of Apple Books as e-reader on iPads and desktop. If you want this book in digital form, the ePub (what you get here) is the way to go, because the Kindle version still has utterly unusable formatting at time of this review.

More detail and tips:

This is a fixed-layout ePub, which although less common than reflowable ePubs, is probably the right choice for this book given the significance of graphic design in its paper presentation.

It is formatted as two-page spreads, but on an iPad in portrait orientation Books.app seamlessly renders one page at a time and you can flip pages normally. Turn to landscape and it will show the two-page spread like an open physical book laid flat. This is almost ideal to me, really.

The only issue is text size—the fixed page dimensions aren't a match to the device's, so screen space is lost to letterboxing and text ends up being small, especially in the two-column layout used heavily in the book. Whether it is comfortable is matter of the reader's eyesight and device size… You can of course pinch to zoom but this will become tedious page after page.

So iPad is a maybe, an iPhone is decidedly not a nice way to consume this.

If you are content to read this book on a computer, it might be the best way. Fullscreen it on a laptop and the two-page spreads fit very nicely. If you want to view one page at time, perhaps alongside note-taking, Apple Books on macOS doesn't seem to be as smart at this as it is on iOS, always rendering the spreads even if you resize the window to be narrow (using Books.app v8.1). The workaround is to turn on View > Vertical Scrolling from the menu. You can still turn pages with left/right arrow keys or Page Up/Down if you don't want to scroll.

The book has proper structured outline data so that you can navigate chapters using the menu.

The publisher last uploaded an updated version in 2014 which may have brought layout fixes, and it’s very likely that Apple Books as reader software has improved experience for fixed-layout ePubs over the years, so possibly the situation is better now than the last reviewer found it.

It may require a concession on what device you read on, but I am quite happy to be able to read Mr. Eisner's book in a high-fidelity form where a printed copy is difficult or expensive to obtain.

This isn’t an ebook, it’s just a glorified PDF. It’s orientation locked, so you can’t read it in landscape mode, and each “page” is actually two pages, so, with it locked in portrait mode, you have to zoom in on the left page, pan to the right page, then turn the page and do it again. This is the reason people hate ebooks. If you’re not going to take the time to format them correctly for the device, don’t do it at all.