Apple Tablet the future of digi comics?

The rumoured Apple touchscreen tablet could be the future of digital comic books, according to MacWorld technical writer Andy Ihnatko.

It has long been speculated that Apple is working on such a device, but no official details have been forthcoming.

"It's starting to look more and more firm that we’ll see something in early 2010, but details are still absolutely mysterious," said Ihnatko. "I guess this is like an early warning system of something really happening, where little crumbs of information start building up."

With black and white books proving a success on Amazon's Kindle Reader, the writer believes that there is great potential for digital comics on a large screen colour device with touch capabilities.

"I really believe the tablet is absolutely necessary to move comics into the digital realm," he added. "Publishers trying to go digital, in most cases, have missed the point up until now. They just don't know how to deal with taking a story designed to fill up an entire page and trying to make it work on a smaller iPhone screen or smaller handheld screen. What they do is they tend to force the path that the reader takes throughout the comic book.

"We're going to need to see the full page," he continued. "We'll need to look wherever we want to look. Artists will have to have the freedom to design the page however they want it to go for it to really work. That's why we want a nice, big colour screen that can at least give you the top half or bottom half of the page and scroll very neatly and very cleanly."

Apple is yet to make an official announcement on the tablet.