kindlerama.com

Here are a couple of Kindle screens I made using Wordle’s free word cloud web-app. To be honest, I’m still undecided about whether the cartoons add too much clutter, but I thought these two were fun regardless considering the subject matter.

Make your own text-based screensavers at Wordle.net.

A helpful reader sent in this tip, and after I checked out the site I knew I had to post it for others to discover. He writes:

There is a very neat website that allows you to create a “word cloud’ from pasted text passages. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

You can make a VERY cool screen saver image by using words from favorite/famous passages.

It has a gallery section where people saved their wordles such as

• Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
• Macbeth
• Star Wars Episode IV script

Obviously you can make your own from your favorite passage or book. I copied text from the Project Gutenberg book “Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”. I copied and pasted my favorite chapter (Tulipomaina) and came out with a really cool screen saver image (after a little work with the settings of course).

I checked out the site and was amazed by the service. It’s FREE, you can paste any text you want, and you can customize the output in a variety of ways, including font, portrait or landscape layout, the number of words you want in your cloud, and so on.

If you love the written word and want some cool original screensavers, check out Wordle!

TechCrunch says someone with direct knowledge of Amazon’s sales figures has told them the company has sold 240,000 Kindles since last November. They figure that this part of Amazon’s business, while still minuscule, has managed to bring in over $100 million so far, which they point out would already surpass what a Citi analyst predicted for 2008 a couple of months ago.

They also mention a more ambitious prediction that seems in line with the 240,000 figure:

Scott Devitt, an analyst at Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., predicts that Amazon is on track to sell 500,000 to 750,000 more Kindles over the next four quarters (including this one). He estimates that Kindle owners will buy an additional $120 to $150 worth of books and other content for each device, bringing the total revenues over that time period to somewhere between $225 million and $355 million. Based on that, he values the Kindle as a $1 billion business for Amazon.

so, does any of this really matter to regular readers? Not so much, except that the more Kindles Amazon sells, the greater its power will grow over the ebook space. Whether that will be good or not for publishing is still up in the air, although I suspect the more power Amazon has, the better the prices and bigger the selection.

“We Know How Many Kindles Amazon Has Sold: 240,000″ [TechCrunch]

Thomas K. wrote, “Is there any chance you just might find a picture good enough for our kindle of Jane Austen?”

Medusa! Some old books! A really ugly dog! And a cartoon Day of the Dead box! Now your Kindle can look weirder than ever when it’s not in use. (Don’t worry, it looks awesome when you’re using it.)