A number of books have caught Hollywood’s eye this month. On top of the option for Karen Jay Fowler’s bestseller “The Jane Austen Book Club” that we noted last week, Bryan Burrough’s recent release “Public Enemies,” about J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI during the gangland days of the ’30s, has been optioned to Universal Pictures.

Rights had been controlled by director Michael Mann and actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who had first tried to produce the project at HBO and “will continue to be involved.”

Meanwhile, HBO has picked up rights to Evan Wright’s “Generation Kill” for development as a six-part miniseries.

The book is based on his reporting for Rolling Stone while on the ground in Iraq with the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion Marines.

Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston’s Plan B productions, created along with Brad Grey, has been a big licensor of film rights to upscale books, and they just added rights to Laura Whitcomb’s forthcoming “A Certain Slant of Light.”

Optioned for low-to-mid six-figures, the book is described as, “the star-crossed love story of two ghosts who in habit the bodies of two teenagers so they can be together.” Plan B has a production deal with Warner Bros.

Another not-yet-released novel optioned for big money is Richard Morgan’s “Market Force.” The book, pitched as “Mad Max meets Wall Street meets Fast and the Furious,” was sold to Warner Bros. in a major deal.

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In a different format entirely, three e-book pioneers think that the MP3-CD standard is the next big thing in audiobooks. Mike Segroves, Jeff Strobel, and Dave Pascoe, who created what’s now known as the Palm Reader software and built that platform into the most successful e-book venture so far, will launch a new company, Paperback Digital, at the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston on Labor Day.

Using the new audio standard, they can compress up to 17 hours of book narration onto a single CD, making lengthy unabridged readings both less expensive and more convenient for readers. The company will specialize in science fiction and fantasy titles, and has priced most of its unabridged audiobooks at $14.95 and $25. Audio files will be available both as a shipped CD and a downloadable digital file.