At Emerald City Comicon last weekend, the interestingly named Rantz Hoseley unveiled the public beta of LongBox, which he envisions as "the iTunes of comics." You can now download Longbox for free over here.

The Beat has a long interview with Hoseley about what Longbox does now and where it's going to be heading:

THE BEAT: Let’s talk about platforms. Of course, the shiny new bauble on the horizon is the iPad. Will LongBox be available on the iPad?

HOSELEY: We have an iPad version in development and an Android tablet version in development and we’re currently looking at the newly announced Winmo 7. In all of these cases it’s not just a matter of the technical adaptation, the bigger issue for us is that we’re not interested in just being in the user interface over to a tablet. There are distinct user interaction requirements that so many people seem to be failing at and that are failing on what the phone, much less what the tablet interface is going to be like. They are not thinking about the usability aspects of it — how is someone going to be holding and navigating this, how is someone going to interact with this device. Making sure that those interactions are consistent in this application [is key for us.] We’ve been thinking about things like the tablet interactions since day one.