Cora attends a mall motorbike show and contemplates getting an e-reader

This afternoon, I visited what was billed as a motorbike show at a local mall. Now mall motorbike shows rarely compare to dedicated motorbike shows for obvious reasons. But this one was such a bust that they should just have called it scooter show and be done with it. For there were hardly any motorbikes at all, most of the exhibitors were scooter vendors. There was little of the auxiliary exhibitors as well, the equipment vendors, clothing and helmet stalls, jewelery stalls, tattooists, etc… In short, it was very disappointing, though there was one stall that sold Alchemy Gothic jewelery. I didn’t find anything I liked, but the lady at the stall told me that they’d be getting in some Steampunk jewelery soon.

There is one big advantage to motorbike shows at malls, though, and that’s the location. Because even if the motorbike show is something of a bust, there are still plenty of regular shops at the mall. Weser Park is actually Bremen’s biggest mall and they do have a pretty good bookstore as well as an electronics store.

I bought two books at the bookstore (three actually, but one was a present), namely One of Our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde and Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch (the present was the German edition of a J.D. Robb book).

“Look, they have e-readers”, my Dad told me. Now the Thalia chain has been selling its own e-reader, the Oyo, for several years now, but my Dad can be forgiven for not knowing that, since he only became aware of e-books when I started publishing them. Still, I have been wanting to check out the Oyo for a while now and the store even had an employee there to explain the reader to customers, so I took the liberty of asking that employee a few questions. The Oyo has a touchscreen and reads epub and PDF format and connects to Thalia‘s online store and can be sideloaded.

The electronics store at the mall had a couple of e-readers as well, namely a Kobo, a Pocketbook and what seemed to be a generic Kindle/Nook/Kobo knock-off called Hanvon. I played around with all of them except for the Pocketbook, because the battery was down.

I still haven’t decided which reader I’ll eventually get, though. The price is pretty even, hovering somewhere between 99 Euros and 130 Euros. Amazon has the best store and due to KDP Select, many books are only available there. Plus, Kobo‘s store is a mess and Thalia is indie unfriendly. On the other hand. I do like the touchscreen function of the Kobo and Oyo readers. As for checking my own books, it doesn’t really matter which reader I choose, since I publish in both epub and mobi/Kindle format. And “I want to see what my books look like on an e-reader” is a large part of my motif for getting one in addition to wanting to read the occasional indie e-book that is not available in print (plus the shipping for Createspace print editions) is always so damn expensive. Besides, I think that an e-reader would be ideal for public readings, if I ever get invited to do one again.

Talking of e-books, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books reports about a case of plagiarism, where indie author Kay Manning a.k.a. Peyton Bradshaw plagiarised various category romances.