I didn't pre-generate the books - that would have taken longer than the lifespan of the earth (that didn't stop me from trying, though!). The books are generated by a pseudo-random algorithm which uses the "location" as the seed. So you get random seeming text, but the same page is in the same place every time. I described some of the coding process here: http://libraryofbabel.info/theory4.html
I'm one of the members of the team that built this.
Some context about the project: We built this a few days ago at the PennApps hackathon during a period of 48 hours. We originally wanted to try to block out magazine advertisements and billboards, but didn't think we could quite get that working with the time constraints, so we chose to block out logos instead. We called the project Brand Killer.
High School student here. Made my first 10k the summer after my Junior year as a software development intern at a startup that had recently been acquired by a larger tech company.
Great article! I too wrote an iPhone game[1] while in high school (2 years ago during sophomore year) and while I didn't make $35k, the game did get downloaded close to 600,000 times while it was free. It was an extremely valuable experience that I learned a lot from.
It always amazed me how easy the App Store made it to access such a vast market and that a game I built in my free time was being downloaded by people in countries as far away as Kazakhstan.
