If you’re like most booksellers, you celebrated Labor Day by working.

If you spent you holiday weekend selling books to folks who weren’t working, you may have missed these interesting bits of Internet flotsam.

Nobody is really sure who is going to direct a film adaptation of Hunger Games, but everyone is pretty sure that the lead will be played by Kick-Ass’ Hit Girl. She’ll definitely have to tone down the potty mouth if this film is to get a PG-13 or younger rating.

The New Yorker eviscerates Rhonda Byrne, The Secret and the mega-cottage industry it has spawned.

The new Odd Couple: he digs his iPad, she likes old-fashioned books. Can two readers devoted to different content delivery systems live in the same apartment without driving each other crazy?

Speaking of Hit-Girl, the actress who plays her (and possibly Hunger Games’ Katniss), Chloe Grace Moretz, is playing the eternally prepubescent vampire in the American remake of Let the Right One In, now titled Let Me In.

Okay, this isn’t exactly new. I had avoided looking at this for a long time, but it turns out my fears may be unwarranted. As long as they don’t tack on a Hollywood ending, it should be pretty good. Check out the trailer and see if you agree. If you haven’t seen the Swedish film of Let the Right One In…do it…now!

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Netflix just released an iPhone app that allows users to stream movies over their phone. Just pick the movie, click the screen, and away you go (assuming that you have a a strong signal over AT&T’s 3G network).

Usually, I like to read a book while I’m in situations where I have short distractions, like waiting in line at the post office, or waiting for a movie (in a theater) to start. It seems almost perverse that I can just fire up Fast Times At Ridgemont High, or season one of The Rockford Files anytime and nearly anyplace I want to.

GalleyCat used this occasion to list the Best Netflix Streaming Movies for Readers: Dramas Based on Contemporary Literature. It’s a swanky list that includes adaptations of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, Omega Man (based on Richard Mathison’s novella I Am Legend), and Stand By Me (based on the Stephen King short story The Body).

The list itself is culled from dozens of movies that Netflix has listed under that rubric.

One obvious choice that I can’t believed they missed was the Swedish adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I guess they figured that nobody would want to strain their eyes trying to read the subtitles on such a tiny screen.

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I thought I had written about this before, but I can’t find a record of it-this will teach me to do a better job of tagging posts.

Anyway, the Wall Street Journal ran an article by Ron Adner and William Vincent, telling us to get ready for ads in books.

I haven’t read the article, since you have to pay, and I don’t really want to subscribe. But Galley Cat has a nice summary.

Basically, my thoughts are as follows:

A) It wasn’t that long ago that mass market paperbacks almost always had ads in the center, usually advertising other books, or a tear-away coupon to send away for a catalog of titles. I don’t remember being freaked out by them.

B) Fay Weldon was paid by Bulgari to be featured in her book The Bulgari Connection. Soon, other writers were accepting paid product placement in their novels and short stories. Even Stephen King was paid by Amazon to write a story featuring a Kindle. Which is worse: an overt ad, or the author taking the money and promoting products in a more covert fashion?

C) While I’m not copacetic with the idea of adverts for cars or malt liquor in new releases, I could live with them if it brought down the cost of ownership. But, since these previous excursions into subsidized literature did nothing to lower the cover prices of these books, I don’t hold out much hope for the future.

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Wow, I frequently forget about how hard it is to blog about publishing in August. This is the time that the publishing elite take off to the Hamptons, and the rest of us proles do our best to stay on top of selling beach reads and ordering Fall frontlist.

Thankfully, io9 has posted a great interview with British SF writer China Miéville, whose latest novel Kraken, is a frightfully good read. In it, Miéville channels his inner Lovecraft to concoct an elaborate (and often funny) tale of giant squids and the cults that love them.

While I don’t agree with him that J.J. Abrams has contempt for his audience, I still found this to be a great interview, especially when, in the embedded video, he does his impersonation from a Godzilla cartoon.

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The fact that Amazon has introduced (yet another) faster, cheaper Kindle, or that Anne Rice, after ditching vampires for Christ, has decided to ditch Christianity as well?

Instead, how about killing some time before the weekend watching the trailer for Howl, the story of Allen Ginsberg’s landmark obscenity trial about a poem that isn’t available in a Kindle edition.

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Really? People need online services for book recommendations?

I would have thought that readers were naturally curious people and would, I don’t know, maybe talk to other readers (friends and family maybe?) for book recommendations.

Or, they could go to their local bookstore and get any number of suggestions, which they can then race home and download onto their Kindles.

Don’t laugh, this happens more times than you think. In fact, if it happens much more, they’re going to describe random violent outbursts as going bookseller, instead of postal.

But, if you’re an agoraphobic shut-in, Lifehacker lists their five most popular book recommendation services, the result of a reader survey.

Funny thing is that a lot of folks voted for friends and family, but not enough to make the top five. Then again, we are talking about what is primarily a tech blog.

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Mad Men returned to the airwaves Sunday, bringing in highballs and Brylcreem to relieve the summer doldrums.

I don’t want to spoil anything for folks who haven’t watched all of the third season, but it looked like some big changes were in store for Don Draper and the denizens of Sterling Cooper, and I can’t wait to see where things are going.

While I’m sure that pieces similar to this have run before (and I’m sure I’ve probably linked to them before), but Flavorwire has compiled what they call a definitive Mad Men Summer reading list, featuring books that have been prominently displayed or referenced in the show.

I don’t recall the show doing much to revive interest in Leon Uris’ Exodus, but it did create a sales spike for Frank O’Hara’s poetry collection Meditations in an Emergency.

Personally, I have a fantasy where Don Draper uses Bert Cooper’s copy of Atlas Shrugged to hammer the bejeezus out of the smarmy Pete Campbell. I think it’s safe to say that it’s a plot line we can all get behind.

As an added AV bonus, here is a video from College Humor featuring a montage of Mad Men’s neanderthal pick-up lines.

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Laura Miller, Salon’s book critic, has penned an interesting article about the craft of recommending books.

To add some heft to the piece, she brings in the uberfrau of book suggestions, famed Seattle librarian and Book Lust scribe Nancy Pearl, whose go-to books are To Kill a Mockingbird, Lonesome Dove and Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner.

It kills me (in a good way) that Pearl is still recommending Mockingbird. I mean, is there anybody over 17 that didn’t have to read it for school? How awesome would it be to read that novel for the first time without the filter of a well-meaning teacher?

The article reminded me of my more waggish days as a bookseller, where I wanted to make “if you like X, you’ll like Y” shelf-talkers with the most absurdly tenuous connections. Ones like “If you liked Fatherhood by Bill Cosby, you’ll like Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver” and “If you liked Sherman Alexie, you’ll like Arundhati Roy” (they’re both Indians, right?).

Sorry if that last joke went a little to far, I was trying to make fun of some of the absurdity that goes into book suggestions, not Native Americans or Booker Prize-winning authors.

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In another press release heard ’round the world, the house of Bezos’ declared that readers are living in la Belle Époque Kindle.

Amazon claims that:

Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books.

What isn’t mentioned is exactly how many of anything Amazon has sold. While ratios are trotted out, there are no metrics by which to measure these claims (except when they declare that of the 1.14 million James Patterson books sold,  867,881 of them were Kindle editions.

One conspicuous absence is the mention of how Kindle editions fared against trade paperback and mass market version when available. Making these comparisons when price isn’t an issue would give the industry something much closer to an apples-to-apples snapshot.

I’m not the only person to notice this. Bertelsmann’s Madeline McIntosh told the Wall Street Journal “Our conclusion is that there’s no data to prove any connection—good or bad—between growth in e-books and the growth or decline, in trade paperback sales”.

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A few days ago, Tin House came up with a great little idea, called Buy a Book, Save a Bookstore. It required writers who submit unsolicited manuscripts to purchase a book at an independent bookstore and send the receipt along with the submission.

In a broad-act of fair play, they offered folks who could not (or to put it less charitably, would not) buy a book the chance to explain why they didn’t, either in haiku or one sentence. They even offered a chance to writers who bought an ebook to send submissions if they explained why they could not get to a bookstore, what ereader they preferred and why.

This seemed pretty benign to me, and a nice acknowledgment of how much Tin House values independent booksellers.

Unfortunately, not everybody is feeling the love. Over at HTML Giant, commentators unloaded on Tin House for their capricious submission prerequisite.

I haven’t actually read these comments myself. I’ve attempted to get on their site for quite a while today, and it isn’t loading onto my browser. Perhaps this has created such a fuss that it crashed their servers.

MobyLives, which is where I first heard about the offer, has a much more detailed report of the exchanges this has generated.

The whole thing reminds me of many conversations I’ve had with small publishers over the years, who tell me, time and again, how writers approach them (maybe after the publisher has been on a panel of some kind), and ask what kind of submissions they are interested in. The publisher usually suggests that the aspiring writer might want to purchase a few of their titles, to get an idea of their editorial vision. The writer then almost universally scoffs at this.

And this whole thing just kills me. I’ll bet you my mother’s wedding ring that these same writers will ask me, as a book buyer, to make an investment in their vocation. Yet they jam their noses in the sky the minute somebody else in the publishing food chain asks them to do the same.

Tin House might wind up giving you the break of a lifetime; is it really asking too much for you to visit a store like  Copperfield’s, Third Place, Powell’s, or Green Apple and drop a sawbuck in their till before you deluge the slush pile?

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