In a surprise cameo, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick has gone Hollywood, appearing in a new trailer for the movie “Moneyball.”

Based on the excellent Michael Lewis book about the Oakland Athletics baseball team and its quirky general manager Billy Beane, who is played by Brad Pitt, Kotick is apparently playing its owner.

Kotick seems to do a pretty good job as a sports mogul, which is not much different than his one as a gaming mogul. And, if it works out as it seems it will, a social networking mogul as a possible new owner of Myspace.

Here’s the video of the trailer for the film, which comes out in September, with Kotick:

That’s author Michael Lewis, talking about the wonders of the Kindle in a 2007 promotional video for Amazon. Alas, what Lewis said then is not true about his new book.

“The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine” has earned great reviews and a big PR push in advance of its release this week. But it’s MIA on Amazon’s e-book store (and Barnes & Noble’s e-book store, as well).

I don’t know if publisher W. W. Norton is intentionally holding the book back from digital distribution because it doesn’t want to avoid cutting into hardcover sales. But if it that’s the case, “The Big Short” wouldn’t be the first book to be “windowed.”

That practice is supposed to end with the new “agency” model that Apple (AAPL) and some big publishers are using with the iPad–and that Amazon has reluctantly agreed to. The downside of the new model for consumers is that prices for newly released e-books will be higher than the $9.99 Amazon has been pushing.

Other Lewis titles–from Norton and other publishers–are available for the Kindle. I’ve asked both Amazon (AMZN) and W. W. Norton for comment.

Here’s Lewis in that 2007 video blurb he filmed for Amazon (thanks to Jay Yarow for spotting). And as an aside: Look at how remarkably fugly that first version of the Kindle was! And think about how much more elegant the device became, very quickly. Worth remembering as you start handicapping Amazon’s chances of competing with the iPad–Jeff Bezos and company are certain to keep improving at a fast clip.

The story went up on VF.com six days ago and has generated just under two million page views since then, says executive online editor Michael Hogan. (Disclosure: I’ve been a free-lance contributor to Vanity Fair’s “New Establishment” list in the past and will be again this year). Had Palin not made her blockbuster announcement on the Friday before the Fourth of July, the piece would be doing even better: Vanity Fair generated more traffic on the Tuesday the story was posted than the day after Palin made her news.

Still, it’s a big coup for the magazine’s site. The only way to generate more attention would be to run a slideshow featuring young attractive women.

Which the site can also do: Its story-and-photo package on Jessica Simpson, which ran in May, attracted 5.5 million page views to the site over a two-day period. Vanity Fair has generated 85 million page views so far this year, Hogan says.

And if you really want to generate traffic, run slideshows featuring very young attractive women. Last year the magazine’s 18-picture slideshow featuring a kind-of-topless Miley “Hannah Montana” Cyrus attracted some 18 million page views in a couple of days.

None of that will be terribly surprising to people who’ve wallowed in Web publishing for any amount of time. What surprised me a bit, though, was Vanity Fair’s decision to publish the piece in its entirety from the start. Doesn’t that cannibalize newsstand sales?

Maybe, says Hogan. But “it’s an open question as to what costs newsstand and what doesn’t.” And as the magazine tries to figure that out, he says, it has been experimenting. Some stuff goes up online before the magazine hits newsstands, while other pieces won’t appear on the site until a month later.

In the case of the Palin piece, the magazine had originally prepared to run an excerpt/summary of the story at first, then make the whole thing available by the end of the month after the news cycle was extinguished.

But on Friday, June 26, a few days before the excerpt was scheduled to run online, the magazine rethought its plan, assuming that the piece would be widely quoted and discussed before most people would ever see it. “The PR department started getting concerned that it was going to be controversial, and they wanted people to read the whole thing, and draw their own conclusions,” Hogan says. The final call went to Editor-in-Chief Graydon Carter, who, I gather, isn’t really much of a Web guy.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting to read Michael Lewis’s latest piece for the magazine, on AIG’s (AIG) notorious “financial products” division. That one’s only available, for now, in excerpt form online, which means I’m actually going to have pay cash to read it, or wait a few hours–Hogan says it should be available in full later today.