The German market is becoming increasingly competitive and the landscape is changing very quickly. Amazon and Kobo both launched versions of their bookstores there, fostering a greater international presence in one of Europe’s strongest markets. To take advantage of the eBook craze Thalia is launching a new e-reader.
Thalia is a leading bookstore chain in Germany and they are often located within shopping centers. Thalia often makes it a business practice to buy out struggling bookstore chains and re-brand them as their own. In 2008 the company saw value in the emerging landscape of ebooks and made a deal with Sony for content distribution and tangible sales. It did not take too long before they decided to phase Sony out and build their own e-reader. Their first model in 2010 did not garner much success outside the German market and was just a very basic device re-branded from a company in India.
Today Thalia announced plans to carry the Oyo II which is a more current e-reader and may see some success. It features a six inch screen with SiPix display technology and a resolution of 800×600 pixels. It will have enough internal memory to host all of your books, with 4GB and an expandable SD card for up to 32 GB. You can connect up to the internet and surf the web via WIFI. The operating system is Linux, like most e-readers.
Thalia has a rich content distribution system with over 300,000 digital books and 90,000 of them in the German language. The e-reader has a launch planned for the fall.
Michael Kozlowski is the Editor in Chief of Good e-Reader. He has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past ten years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and Verge.