“As a former Amazon Associate, I can tell you that a great many sales of Kindle Books are for the 99¢ complete Dickens, etc.”

–Movie critic and Web publisher Roger Ebert, providing some context for Amazon’s stat about Kindle e-books outselling print books.

“I give [Apple] two years before they’re turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake.”

– A 2001 prediction by David Goldstein, president of Channel Marketing, about Apple’s newly launched retail stores, which celebrate their 10th anniversary this week.

Had to monitor Fox for a story. Can’t. Deal. With. The. Blathering.

– Message posted yesterday to the Secret Service’s official Twitter account. The agency later told the Washington Post that an employee “mistakenly believed they were on their personal account.” The tweet has been deleted, and the agency says it is “conducting appropriate internal follow-up.”

“Our experience has changed us and shaped how we view our responsibility to the industry. We are pleased to bring this matter to successful resolution, and we are excited to keep delivering great products and services for our partners and customers.”

– Microsoft on the expiration of its 10-year antitrust consent decree

Most companies don’t get murdered, they commit suicide.

– EDventure’s Esther Dyson on Twitter

“Al Qaeda Inc. might suffer some initial setbacks from Osama bin Laden’s death, but so did Apple Inc. when shares dropped over rumors of Steve Jobs’ illness. But it did not take long to realize that Jobs has established a highly functional corporation, and the shares bounced back. The same can be expected for al Qaeda.”

– CNN jumps to an early lead in the Most Repugnant Analogy of the Year competition.

I do know that ‘monetization’ is an option for me, and I do realize that I have been ‘missing out on some big bucks’ and not ‘milking the media for what it is worth’ – I just don’t have the energy or motivation to think in that direction. Or maybe I’m just plain stupid.

Sohaib Athar, who became a celebrity after unwittingly live-tweeting part of the Osama bin Laden raid, explaining that he’s not charging for interviews. Athar has just published a FAQ that attempts to cut down on the need for more interviews, and it’s well worth reading.

Bin Laden is dead. I didn’t kill him. Please let me sleep now.

– Sohaib Athar, the Pakistani IT consultant who unwittingly live-Tweeted the bin Laden raid, and who has since been inundated with media requests.

I’d say [the] rapid rise of the tablet. I didn’t completely see that coming.

– Dell CEO Michael Dell on what’s surprised him most about the evolution of the tech industry

“I know it sounds crazy, but our new company, http://altly.com, is building an alternative to Facebook. More details soon :-)”

– Former Veoh CEO, and, more recently, former MySpace Music CTO Dmitry Shapiro, setting some not-very modest goals for himself via Twitter.

“As a RIM investor, I was sort of hoping there would be more customers than reporters here.”

– Henry Kim, one of two customers who lined up outside Toronto’s Future Shop for a BlackBerry PlayBook this morning

“I like our chances for a lot of share. We’re very excited about where we are.”

–Research in Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie on the BlackBerry PlayBook’s chances in the tablet market

“It was a gift from God to save Apple.”

– Former Apple Evangelist Guy Kawasaki on PageMaker

“If you believe demographic studies, the workforce in their 20s and 30s isn’t going to accept black corporate PCs with black corporate mobile phones and not be allowed to run Facebook or Angry Bird apps.”

– Clorox CIO Ralph Loura, who has scrapped company-issued BlackBerries, offering employees their choice of an iPhone or an Android- or Windows Phone 7-powered device

They used to be our big rival, but now it’s kind of like kicking a puppy.

– Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin on Microsoft

“I couldn’t be happier that Apple has created a market and built up enthusiasm but longer term, open, capable and affordable will win, not closed, high price and proprietary. Apple is great if you’ve got a lot of money and live on an island. It’s not so great if you have to exist in a diverse, open, connected enterprise; simple things become quite complex.”

– Andy Lark, Dell’s global head of marketing for large enterprises and public organizations, on Apple and the iPad’s role in enterprise

“I’m the president of the United States. You think I’ve got to go borrow somebody’s computer? ‘Hey, man, can I borrow your computer? How about you? You’ve got one?’”

– BlackBerry fan Barack Obama, explaining to a Univision-hosted Town Hall meeting that he also owns other devices, including Apple’s tablet.

“They’ll be bigger than IBM next year, and they’ll be bigger than HP the year after that.”

– Forrester Research CEO George Colony predicts Apple will soon be a $200 billion revenue company

“I killed newspapers.”

– Eric Schmidt’s suggested epitaph, via Washington Post legend Bob Woodward. It’s not accurate, of course–real culprits range from an overabundance of commodity news, to the evaporation of classified ads and monopoly ad pricing to an over-reliance on debt markets–but it is pithy.

“I don’t think that we’re playing catch up to anyone, least of all IBM.”

– Hewlett-Packard CEO Léo Apotheker returns IBM’s fire at the company’s big strategy meeting today.

“The white iPhone will be available this spring (and it is a beauty!).”

– Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, on the much delayed white iPhone 4

“When you think about the impact cable had, we think we’re in a position to have a similar impact for video delivery, like what cable has done with broadcast….What’s amazing is that the Web enables you to build a kind of channel that wouldn’t have made sense for cable, in the same way cable enabled you to build content that wouldn’t have made sense for broadcast. You couldn’t have done CNN with the broadcast networks; you couldn’t have done MTV with the broadcast networks.”

– YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar, interviewed by the Mercury News, giving us a pretty good sense of the ambition and strategy guiding Google’s video giant.

“Can you put food on the table with music? Probably not. I see music as a really great hobby for most people in five or 10 years. I see everybody I know, some of them really important artists, studying how to do other jobs.”

– Cake lead singer John McCrea talking to NPR, via Digital Music News. Showroom of Compassion, Cake’s most recent release, is the lowest-selling number-one album of all time.

I’ve never logged onto Facebook before but I hear it’s nice. In terms of e-mail, Facebook has it built in.

Former “spam king” Robert Soloway, who has spent the last three years and eight months away from his computer while serving a federal prison sentence. Soloway, who was released last week, sent out 10 trillion emails during a 10-year spam career. Probation officers will monitor his computer use for the next three years.

“Having itself faced a decades-long genericness challenge to its claimed WINDOWS mark, Microsoft should be well aware that the focus in evaluating genericness is on the mark as a whole and requires a fact-intensive assessment of the primary significance of the term to a substantial majority of the relevant public. Yet, Microsoft, missing the forest for the trees, does not base its motion on a comprehensive evaluation of how the relevant public understands the term APP STORE as a whole.”

– Apple defends its right to trademark “App Store”