I have caught a new addiction: I hunt the net for free and bargain eBooks. Thanks to the delightful folks at Mobileread and here at AAR Potpourri Forum, and thanks to special discounts offered by ebookstores like Fictionwise or Kobo, and by publisher sites like Harlequin, Avon or Carina, I pick up loads of books for comparatively little money. Let’s take the last two months: In April, I acquired 66 new eBooks, and altogether I paid $ 70. In May I acquired 171 new eBooks, and I paid $ 210. On average, that’s $ 1.18 per book, and considering I still paid full price for a number of them, you can see how many came completely free. Before I started to gather my numbers, I was going to write that I now bought more books than usual, but paid less for them than I had done with paper books. Faced with the exact numbers now, I must concede that while this is certainly true for April, in May I spent more on books than usual, ending up acquiring far higher numbers than in any other month before.
I made extensive use of Kobo’s delightful € 1 off discount for a lot of books, especially books from Smashwords and Harlequin that were cheap to start with, and with the discount came free, or virtually free. Similarly, in May there were very good discounts and bargain prices offered from Fictionwise and Carina Press. I want to point out that I acquired all of my new books legally, respecting geographical restrictions and never pretending I was from anywhere but Europe. And I want to add that were I a citizen of the United States, I would have had even more books available, and were I prepared to read books on my PC with a Kindle App, even more.
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Like many people around the world, I am deeply affected by what is happening in Japan. My heart goes out the Japanese people, and I admire the steadfastness and determination, not to mention great courage with which they deal with the terrible situation they find themselves in.
I am a history geek – for some reason unknown to me, when it comes to history, my brain registers and stores a multitude of little details presented to it, unlike, say, names of trees or car brands. I regularly astonish people by knowing historical facts that are way out. Yet I hardly ever open a book of historical fiction, even less often a book of reference. I have learnt what I know about history from reading romances.
Although romance has departed far from its more formulaic patterns in the 1970s and earlier, becoming more diverse and thus more forgiving of ingredients that break the mold, still there are situations that are considered just too unromantic to be included, as common as such situations may be in real life. Let’s liberate them, and give them some space here!
There are very few books out there I will buy in hardback. Hardbacks have several severe disadvantages, mainly:
There is one matter of taste in which I appear to differ from most romance readers: I have a great fondness for blond heroes. Love’em. But I seem to be part of minority, because the majority by far of romance heroes are dark-haired. Not that I mind a yummy black-haired hero … but I sigh for blonds.
Recently I came across the Castle books, thrillers ostensibly written by author Richard Castle, who is the hero of TV series Castle but in reality penned by a ghostwriter. I read that several chapters of the first book, 
During a visit my twelve-year-old niece paid to my place last weekend, I took her to the guest room, where I keep my children’s and YA literature, and chose some books with her to borrow over the summer holidays. Many of my books there are classics, the majority are books I read when I was a kid myself. So after my niece had picked out a few titles on her own, I handed her several others which I think she might like. I especially recommended Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce, and my niece ended taking the whole Song of the Lioness quartet. Today I am informed she is by now on her second reading of the whole set.
When I bought my first eBook reader, an Opus, in December, I felt both like a pioneer – eBook readers are not at all common in Germany yet, and I’d only seen one in the flesh before, on a train in England – and, at the same time, like a dinosaur, because already the media were prophesying instant death for all eBook readers due to the advent of the iPad. (Well, I have only seen one iPad in the flesh so far, on a train in Germany.) I was excited and curious when I got my new gadget: Would I really use it enough to justify handing over a considerable amount of money? Would it be as easy to handle as a paper book? How would I deal buying eBooks online? Would my reading habits change?
During my book club’s latest meeting, a friend who’d seen the play version of a novel most of us had read, showed around some leaflets of the production and asked whether the two actors who played the leads were in accordance with how we’d imagined them. This lead to a rather funny moment, because of the six women present, three instantly claimed they never visualize the main protagonists of any novel they read, whereas the other three said they visualized them without fail, and that watching a stage or movie production later with actors that didn’t fit with their expectations, could ruin the play or film for them.
