Amazon to Announce Quarterly Earnings. With the markets closed today in religious observance, it seems a good time to note that next Tuesday, after the close of the normal trading day, Amazon will announce its most recent quarterly earnings and hold a conference call for analysts to drill down on what the numbers really mean. The event will be webcast live, and the audio and associated slides will be available for at least three months thereafter at www.amazon.com/ir. I always find it interesting in these conference calls to see what the questions and answers portend for the future of the Kindle and related innovations. Amazon’s share price is currently about 3 percent off its all time high and has been especially healthy since the announcement and immediate launch of the Amazon Cloud Drive on March 29, as shown by this comparison with the NASDAQ COMP index and Apple’s share price since March 28:

Marketwatch Share Prices Since March 28, 2011 – AMAZN Green, COMP Red, AAPL Blue

BookLending.com Raising Funds for WorldReader. If you’ve just sold off your AMZN or AAPL stock for millions in gains, or even if you’re just one of the rest of us commoners, you might want to join the good folks (and our partners) at BookLending.com who have committed themselves to raising $5,000 in funds to help the wonderful people at WorldReader.org in their mission to help change kids’ lives with ebooks, all around the world. You’ve heard about WorldReader.org here at Kindle Nation before, and you can learn more about

Locke

this great fundraising challenge — and participate — by clicking here.

John Locke’s Kindle Earnings Pass $100,000 a Month. Speaking of folks who are doing very nicely, thank you very much, it is truly remarkable to see what some Kindle authors have achieved in a very short time. According to this very interesting piece in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, novelist John Locke’s Kindle unit sales have grown from 1,300 in November to 75,000 in January to 369,000 in March. Click here to see all Locke’s books on Amazon.