Picking up where ComicBookLover left off
ComicBookLover was one of the first comic readers built for the iPad — simple viewing tools and a genuinely logical way to organize a collection so you always knew what you had. When it stopped working with iOS 8, nothing that came after quite captured the same spirit.
Longbox Reader started as a side project in 2017, stalled when the original technology choice became a wall rather than a foundation. In 2022, the focus shifted to what would become Digital Longbox — a proper scanner and metadata editor for a local comic collection — and a working prototype came together before performance problems stalled it again. Work resumed in 2025 and led to the apps you can download today.
Along the way, a handful of very different tools shaped how these apps think about your files, without copying any of them directly:
WinAMP + CDDB
Just knew which songs matched your files. That kind of quiet, automatic recognition is what comic scanning aims for.
Media Companion
A Windows tool for generating metadata for local media files — the inspiration behind editable, enrichable comic metadata.
Plex
Serves your own local media across your network. Digital Longbox does the same thing, for comics instead of video.
A note on content: Digital Longbox and Longbox Reader are personal media management tools, like Plex — for comics. Neither app includes, distributes, or provides access to any comic books or copyrighted content. You supply your own lawfully obtained files.