A literary clock for your Kindle

Instead of showing numbers, it shows a quote from a book that contains the current time.

Old Kindle on a bookshelf displaying a literary quote with the time
Medium difficulty Free guide

The Literary Clock is one of those ideas that sounds gimmicky when you first hear it and then quietly refuses to leave your head. It’s a clock. It tells you the time. But every minute it shows a different book quotation that happens to contain the current time. Twelve past three might give you a line from Murakami. Twenty to eight might be something from Agatha Christie. For the full day there are 1,440 minutes, and enthusiasts have assembled 1,440 matching quotes.

It is genuinely beautiful, entirely useless, and a perfect reason to keep an old Kindle on a shelf. BGR listed it among the best creative uses for old Kindles; the original concept comes from an art project by Jaap Meijers, and the quote sets have been compiled and shared by the maker community on GitHub.

What the finished thing does

Every minute, the Kindle displays a new quote. Each quote contains the current time somewhere in its text — “It was half past four in the morning and Susan was still awake”, say, or “He checked his watch: 11:45”. Below the quote, the clock shows the book title, the author, and often a small credit. The refresh is nearly silent and uses almost no battery.

Because the Kindle screen holds an image with zero power between refreshes, the only cost of updating once a minute is the brief moment it takes the e-ink controller to repaint the screen. A wall-mounted Kindle doing nothing but running the literary clock will run for a surprisingly long time on a single charge — days to a couple of weeks, depending on the model.

What you’ll need

How it works

  1. You load a quote set onto the Kindle’s storage.
  2. The Kindle’s internal clock runs normally. A small shell script, triggered every minute via cron, reads the current time and looks up the matching quote in the quote-set file.
  3. The script generates a rendered image of the quote using the Kindle’s eips tool (or KOReader’s display helpers, if you’ve installed KOReader).
  4. The Kindle’s screen is updated. The refresh is fast enough on most models to happen in under a second.
  5. Repeat, minute by minute, until somebody takes it down to charge.

Advanced builds include:

Which Kindle models does this work on?

Any jailbreakable e-ink Kindle. The E-ink Pearl screens on the 2011 and 2012 devices render text beautifully — arguably more beautifully than the backlit screens on newer models, because there’s no subtle glow competing with the type. The Kindle 4 and 5 buttons (no touch) are a nice match for a wall-mounted clock because there’s no accidentally-poked screen. Paperwhite 1st gen adds the backlight for night reading but slightly higher power draw.

Not recommended: Kindle Fire tablets (LCD, wrong aesthetic, shorter battery). Kindle 1st and 2nd gen are technically possible but community support is thin.

Gotchas and honest notes

Where to go next

The Survival Guide has a dedicated literary-clock chapter that walks through installing a curated quote set, setting up the cron job, and tuning the refresh for battery life. It also links to the best open quote-set repositories on GitHub at time of writing, which change frequently as the community maintains them.

If you’re curious and want to see someone else’s build first, start with the BGR round-up at bgr.com/2051007/uses-for-your-old-kindle/, which covers the literary clock as one of several ideas.

Other projects you might like

Sources for this page: BGR — “Uses for your old Kindle”; the original Literary Clock art project by Jaap Meijers (various online write-ups); community quote sets on GitHub (repositories change frequently). Not affiliated with Amazon.