I’m currently in Aberdeen in Scotland (for more information see my main blog).
As always when I’m travelling, I also paid some attention to e-readers seen in the wild and in stores. Though frankly, so far I did not see a single e-reader in the wild during this trip, though I saw an e-reader in a Bremen tram (where they’re a very rare sight indeed) last week. I think it was an Oyo, the e-reader peddled by the Thalia bookstore chain.
However, I did see some e-readers in British shops. A big highstreet W.H. Smith had a very nice display of Kobo readers to try out. They had the whole range from the basic model to the Kobo Vox tablet and plenty of accessories, too. I played around with the readers on display (in Germany, you can only get the most basic Kobo reader in stores) and quite liked the Kobo Glo, though I’ll probably go with a Kindle in the end.
You can buy Pegasus Pulp e-books at the W.H. Smith online store by the way.
I had hoped that I could also testdrive some of the more advanced Kindles, since Staples only offers the most basic model in Germany and the display models never work. And Amazon had just recently announced a partnership with UK bookstore chain Waterstone’s to sell Kindles. Alas, while the stores were being remodeled to include Kindle kiosks, there were no Kindles on display yet. Too bad, because I had hoped to try out the Paperwhite.
As for the Nook, I didn’t see any at Blackwell’s, which supposedly sells them, but then it was a tiny store. I didn’t even try John Lewis, because I don’t want a Nook anyway, since there’s no store to go with them. Besides, I had heard that Barnes & Noble had to delay their UK launch.
In the meantime, I bought a bunch of print books. Apparently, the mass market paperback is all but extinct in the UK, which bothers me, because mass market paperbacks have always been my favourite format. If a format had to die, couldn’t they have killed off those annoying hardcovers?
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Try Curry’s or PC World for the kindles. There should be one of the two on the high street, and they tend to have all the models on display. Big Tesco’s often have them as well.
Very surprised that you haven’t seen any e-readers in the wild. I always see loads on the trains on my commute to work here in Liverpool. Really a lot of them… I had a look round just this morning and there were at least 10 people that I could see on my train carriage alone using dedicated e-readers.
I saw a Curry’s on the high street. No idea that stores other than Waterstone’s carry Kindles – in Germany, you can only get them at Amazon and a few at Staples.
I wasn’t on a train this time around, only on some busses and I didn’t see any there. None on the plane or the airport either.
Libri.de while transforming into ebooks.de offered the current Sony-Reader TS2 for 99 Euros with three additional ebooks to pick. And a 30 days money back warranty. So I taste-tested (I’m a Sony fan since the 505, my first eReader) and really enjoyed the incredible speed even with 700 files on board – and I still have one GB of the interior drive left. I’ll be keeping that (though I do fear that this will have been the last Sony Reader and I’m not happy that it doesn’t have .lrf support).
Unfortunately, Sony products and I don’t get along. They inevitably break down on me after a year at most. So Sony is out of the question. But thanks for the tip anyway.