I finally took some time to personalize the screensavers on my Kindle 3, thinking it would be a quick hour or less. And indeed, the process of jailbreaking a Kindle and hacking it to load your own screensavers is drop dead simple. That part really didn’t take any time at all.
The hard part is more deciding what pictures you want to see as a screensaver every day, a task that ended up taking me all afternoon. I first got caught up thumbing through the free downloads on the Kindle Wallpapers Tumblr, which is fascinating on its own.
Then I decided to add a few of my own pictures, so I found a half dozen of my favorites, converted them to black and white, and shrunk them down to 600 x 800.
When I posted on Facebook about what I was doing, someone lamented that she’d recently left her Kindle on a plane, which made me flash back to something I read several years ago. I can’t find a reference to it right now (little help?), but I remember reading about a guy who took pictures of himself and text on signs about how to return the camera if someone found it. He then kept those picture at the beginning of his camera’s memory card in case someone ever found the camera and looked through the photos.
I’ve always thought that was brilliant, so I figured I’d try it with my Kindle. I took a picture, added some text, and then loaded it as a screensaver.
Granted, it’s unlikely that this particular image will be displaying if I lose my Kindle, but my hope is that whoever finds it will be interested enough in the screensaver that is showing to scroll through them. I know it’s a long shot, but it was also something fun to do.
Which then got me thinking about libraries. Are there any libraries customizing the screensavers on their Kindles? As a librarian, I came across some free, library-related screensavers, so I put a few of them on my own device. If you, too, want some library-themed screensavers, here are the ones I’ve found so far:
- Books cannot be killed by fire
- Save the Library
- Various pictures of books in the Books category
- John Kirriemurr’s “Use Libraries and Learn Stuff” image
- I chose some of my personal favorites from Phil Bradley’s Library Posters
- It’s smaller than the other pictures, but I like Aaron Schmidt’s take on the Universal Library Symbol image
Do you know of other images we could use to build a list for libraries and librarians?
Share: 3 Comments on Library-related Kindle Screensavers, last added: 5/17/2011
A word of warning about jail-breaking the Kindle to do this. It will void the warranty with Amazon and will hinder the ability to install any software updates or fixes that Amazon releases. From anecdotes I heard about the latest Kindle update, it installed on jail-broken Kindles, but then made it impossible to undo the jail-breaking or to add additional screensavers to the Kindle. So jail-break your Kindle with caution!
Wow — thanks, Frank. I hadn’t seen that information in my research, so that’s good to know. I knew it would probably void the warranty, but I wasn’t sure if Amazon would support library Kindles to begin with. But this is a good warning — I can’t in good conscience recommend this to libraries, so individuals should only consider this at their own risk.
Jenny
I thought I should also mention that the article that explains how to jailbreak your Kindle also includes a detailed description of how to uninstall the hack. So when the next update comes out, I’ll probably uninstall the hack, do the update, and then re-install it when the new version is ready.