So Amazon has announced the availability of their e-book reader Kindle for, among other countries, Germany and Austria. The reader may be pre-ordered on Amazon.com, and will be shipped after October 19th. Costs? About 190€.

It’s good news for anyone who likes to read and especially good news for anyone who likes to read and be able to automatically download new books for a cheaper price than their physical brethren.

It’s bad news though for everyone who doesn’t feel too comfortable with the possibility of a company barging into your home and removing a previous purchase without warning (but with putting the purchase price back into your purse). Sound extremely weird and paranoid? Well, it’s not, because that’s exactly what happened a few months back.

Apparently a company had offered books on the Kindle marketplace for which it, as it turned out later, didn’t have the rights. So when Amazon discovered that tricky situation, they snuck into the Kindles of the people who had already bought the books and removed them. To add irony to injury, the books were “Animal Farm” and “1984″ by George Orwell.

And even though Amazon promised to not remove books in the future without warning, I’m a far too suspicious mind to really believe that. Because as long as they can, they probably will.

Update: LibraryThing mastermind Tim has finished integrating BookMooch (and a few other book-swapping sites) into LibraryThing. Yay! Finally I can try to put my Java book to good use! Read the announcement on the LibraryThing blog.

BookMooch, another service focusing on books was recently released. While one of my most favourite Web2.0 ventures, LibraryThing, is focusing primarily on the theoretical aspect of a social web for book lovers, namely being able to compare ones collection to others, write reviews, etc., BookMooch is actually going one step further:

Their slogan “New Life for Old Books” very much summarises what the service is about. Swap your old books for other people’s old books. The idea is simple, and so is the implementation. When you sign up, BookMooch makes you enter 10 book you’d like to have, then you can enter books you would like to swap with others. To fill your list of the 10 desired books, you can also import your Amazon wishlist, which is a nice idea. The whole thing is managed by a points system, so people don’t start mooching books off of others without sending some out themselves.

The service is a very good idea for people with limited budgets, or people with limited space. The only thing that’s missing now is a reciprocal API to LibraryThing.

PS: I just saw that they are actually linking to the LibraryThing entries of the books! Nice! Now let me synchronize the two services, and I’m one happy book lover!