In true book nerd fashion, we’ve rounded up our favorite publishing-related links of the week for you! Read on to uncover the best in books this week. If you want to know about these links sooner than Friday afternoon, follow us on Twitter—@GreenleafBookGr.

• A CNN study says Generation X is balanced and happy. As much as generational “stereotypes” can drive us all a little bonkers, this is a nice read considering the wrath Generation X has received over the past decade. 

• These days it seems there is a way to make anything social. Mashable highlights the ways in which ebooks are being socialized by Findings, a site where readers can collect, share, and discuss notable passages and texts from ebooks.

• The hottest debate in the publishing world: which are better, ebooks or printed books? Let’s get down to the bottom of this. Regardless of sales, is there really a difference? Apple to oranges, or all the same?

• Steve Jobs, are you watching us? Kat Bailey seems to think so. Bailey created a Watched by Steve blog tribute. Playful memorial, or fanatic fan?

• What the ****? Did that get your attention? Some publishers seem to think so. The trend of using profanity in titles has become increasingly popular over the last year. An interesting example can be seen in the “fluke hit,” by Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortes’ bestselling kids' book parody, Go the F**k to Sleep. This book has spent six months on the bestseller lists! Whaaat.

• Time to get geeky! The greatest geek books of all time are listed by Wired. Robert Heinlin and George Orwell, we would hang out with you guys any day of the week.

• Ebooks are still on the rise, claiming a whopping 116% increase in August. “For the first eight months of 2011, ebook sales increased 144.4%, to $649.2 million, from 18 reporting publishers to the AAP monthly statistics program," wrote Publishers Weekly. "Sales were off by double digits in all trade print segments in the January-August period, although sales in the religion category were up 9% in the year to date at the 22 reporting houses.”

• Is the Nook Color 2 Launching on November 7? TechCrunch seems to think so. Last year this tablet set the standard for enhanced e-readers with its color LCD screen and Android release, but we’ll see if it can compete with Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

• Theories debunked! We highly enjoyed the Used Furniture Review article “10 Myths About Bookselling.” Myths include “Bookselling Isn’t a Career,” “Bookselling Is a Low-Stress Job,” and “Bookselling is Dead.”

• Kobo announces an arm in publishing as it signs e-reader sales deal with UK bookstore chain W H Smith. We give kudos to Kobo for their attempt to compete with Amazon in offering complete publishing services for authors.

A while back we provided some tips on how to go about securing endorsements for your book.

Endorsements can make a big difference when it comes to influencing behavior. If you’re a first-time author, you have a major hurdle to overcome in establishing credibility. This is a challenge you will face not only with readers, but with retail buyers—the employees who decide what stock to bring into their bookstores—as well.

Consumers are undoubtedly swayed by endorsements of all kinds. There are celebrities of every kind connected to products of every sort. Celebrity endorsements are a multibillion-dollar industry in our country. Though it’s impossible to track exact sales results back to specific endorsements, investors seem to think they work: stock prices are often positively impacted when a company secures a super-high-profile endorser. Companies also see an increase in sales when the right endorsement hits the airwaves. It’s true that not all endorsements have this effect, but it happens often enough for huge companies to spend huge budgets continuing the practice.

No one knows for sure what goes through the consumer’s mind when she sees an endorsement (except the consumer herself, of course), but the theory goes that the association of a particular product with a famous person influences the consumer to act. Maybe she thinks that the product must be the best in its category or else the celebrity wouldn’t be associated with it. Maybe she thinks that if she uses the same product the celebrity uses, she will somehow be like the celebrity. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is that the endorsement influenced a purchase.

Relating this concept to your credibility as a first-time author is pretty straight- forward. Consumers don’t know who you are (yet), so you influence their buying behavior by being associated with someone they do know. That’s not to say that all your endorsements need to be from world-famous celebrities, though of course the bigger the name, the bigger the influence. Your endorsers do need to be recognizable and influential in terms of what they do, who they work for, or books they have written. Basically, they have to have serious credentials—credentials that will give your work credibility.

Strong endorsements work wonders with retail buyers for the same reason. Retail buyers know that those endorsements are going to sway their customers, so they take them into account when deciding whether to stock your book on their crowded shelves.

You can leverage endorsements in other ways that will help build your author platform as well. Below are some suggestions that will continue growing your reach and your audience.

• Leverage the relationship with your endorser to reach their platform through a plug in their newsletter or as a guest contributor to their blog
• Use your biggest endorsements as a lead-in when approaching media and bloggers about featuring your book
• Share your endorsements with your social networking connections and ask them to share the good news with new readers
• Connect with your endorsers through any social networks they’re on and ask  if they will share their endorsement of your book with their fans and connections
• Ask your newsletter subscribers to respond to a survey about which endorsement is the most influential, letting them know that the winning endorsement will go on the front cover of the book (and of course, they can pass along that survey to friends and peers)

Always remember to give something of value to the people you are enlisting to help, whether they are the endorsers themselves or your already-loyal readers and subscribers. If you can find a way to benefit everyone involved—even if it’s in an intangible way, like connectivity to the final product—you will get less resistance and better results.