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!

• Leave a comment... (0)

• Leave a comment... Comments Off

Marketing guru (and author of books such as Purple Cow and the recent Linchpin) Seth Godin has announced that he is ditching traditional publishing after successfully publishing 12 bestselling titles.

According an upcoming interview with Mediabistro, he says “I like the people, but I can’t abide the long wait, the filters, the big push at launch, the nudging to get people to go to a store they don’t usually visit to buy something they don’t usually buy, to get them to pay for an idea in a form that’s hard to spread”.

It’s hard to argue with him on this front, especially since he’s the kind of author who has bestsellers even after giving away the contents for free online. He writes the type of books that are quick to read, but somehow manage to resonate for a long time afterwaradsf; basically hit-and-run jobs on the business brain.

Still, it would be nice to think that if the market still exists for his books in the traditional paper and ink format (and it’s hard to believe that there isn’t), that he might license the content via print-on-demand.

• Leave a comment... Comments Off

I’m not one of those people who are riding the irony-fueled Betty White express, but I have to admit that I did a complete 180 on my opinion of her book deal with Putnam.

On one hand, I was feeling total Betty fatigue. It’s great that she’s getting commercials and hosting Saturday Night Live. I even got a good laugh out of her appearance on the cover of the Portland Mercury (above). But Workman’s Betty White 2011 Calendar was a bit much. Hearing that she scored a two-book deal drove a stake through whatever warm fuzzies I was feeling towards her suddenly increased profile.

However, in addition to a memoir, it seems that her second book, tentatively titled The Zoo and I: Betty and Her Friends, is about her animal rights activism.

Even I am not so cynical as to not appreciate where she is coming from on that front.

(via EW’s Shelf Life)

• Leave a comment... Comments Off

Newsweek has a previously unseen photo of J.D. Salinger as part of a larger feature on a documentary film about the late reclusive author.

Shaft (the remake) screenwriter Shane Salerno has put together not only a film on Salinger, but also an 800-page biography.

Salerno claims to have spent six years working on these projects. It would be interesting to see a breakdown on how much work he was able to get done in the first over five and a half years versus the last eight months following Salinger’s death in January.

(via Galley Cat)

• Leave a comment... Comments Off

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.

• Leave a comment... Comments Off

There is an AP report just out that, while not shedding too much light on the details surrounding Stieg Larsson’s mysterious unfinished manuscript for a fourth Millennium novel featuring the characters of Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist.

Thanks to Swedish probate laws, the late author’s unmarried partner is locked in a dispute with his family, who claim to have the legal right to Larsson’s literary estate.

Like I said, it’s not exactly new information, but it is a handy primer on the conflict so far.

One things for sure, if they don’t strike while the iron is red hot, they are going to miss the boat. And if it turns out to be another Poodle Springs, Raymond Chandler’s unfinished Philip Marlowe novel completed by Robert B. Parker four decades later, who is really going to care?

(Photo: AP File)

• Leave a comment... Comments Off

American Splendor creator and all-around professional curmudgeon Harvey Pekar passed away Monday. He was suffering from a litany of maladies,  including prostate cancer and high blood pressure. He was 70.

The New York Times, in their obituary, describe Splendor as “…”a distinctive series of dispatches from an all-too-ordinary life”. I don’t think I can say anything that sums up his career so succinctly.

Instead, I offer up two clips: the first is  a trailer for the film adaptation/documentary that was made in 2003, the second is a thoroughly engaging clip of (what I think) is his last appearance on David Letterman’s old show Late Night. He took Letterman to task for what he thought was shilling for General Electric (NBC’s parent company and a relationship that provide a great deal of the humor on 30 Rock) and, in turn, made himself persona non grata with the network.

• Leave a comment... Comments Off

On Tuesday afternoon, Amazon was down for nearly five hours, effectively shuttering the largest retail destination on the web.

As I pondered to myself about how many millions of dollars in revenue were being lost per minute, it seems that there were some very human victims to Amazon’s crash.

GalleyCat was taking the temperature of the industry, asking folks to write in about their experiences, and it turns out that were authors planning big email and social networking blitzes to promote new books (it was a Tuesday after all). They linked these to Amazon, only to have lost their online sales partner.

One author, Tracy Davis, wrote “DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY TEXTS AND E-MAILS I RECEIVED COMPLAINING THAT THE NOVEL WASN’T EVEN AVAILABLE????” (author’s emphasis/screaming).

I guess when an industry places many of their eggs in one basket, something like this is bound to happen.

And won’t somebody think of those poor readers who actually had to leave their homes to purchase books!

• Leave a comment... Comments Off

It wasn’t scheduled to go on sale until next week, but Scholastic has given word that booksellers can now start selling the paperback edition of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games (Scholastic PB 9780439023528 $8.99).

Now, if only they would speed up the release of the third book in the series Mockingjay. I mean, am I the only person thinking that A) waiting until Summer is nearly over (August 24th) to release it and B) releasing it on a Tuesday, rather than a Saturday, probably weren’t the brightest moves for the Summer’s most anticipated juvenile title?

I know what you’re probably saying: “well, it’s not like it’s Harry Potter“. Well, it won’t be with a strategy like that.

• Leave a comment... Comments Off