Note: Be sure to read Frank Skornia’s com­ment below about the con­se­quences of jail­break­ing your Kin­dle.

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 Kirriemuir’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?