The NY Times has now started including e-book sales in their list of best sellers. Their competitors had started this practice much earlier.

In fact, the Billboard charts, which are in many ways the music industry’s equivalent of the New York Times’ Bestseller list, included the sales of electronic music and radio airplays when determining the Hot 100 much before that.

According to the statistics available from the NY Times, e-books seem to be selling much faster than the regular print versions. This is especially true in the fiction category and also to a large extent in the non-fiction category.

Interestingly, the top 5 titles in the e-book versions and the print versions are the same, but the top 5 titles in the hard-back and paper-back versions of the printed books are different.

The fact that e-books are selling faster than the printed ones has also been corroborated by USA Today. The rapidly growing sale of e-books is bound to lead to the question of piracy.

It is a well known fact that people generally exchange their books with their friends and colleagues. In fact, an old proverb says that one of the best things about gifting someone a book is that you can always borrow it from them. If this were to start happening with e-books, it will invariably lead to allegations of piracy from publishers and sellers such as Amazon.

Google is reported to have said that during the second quarter of the year, marketers were more likely to agree to pay a higher charge for their ads to appear online. This was probably a result of the fact that users were more likely to click on the ads.

The largest newspaper publisher in the U.S. Gannett Co. has also reported a positive trend in the print media after a gap of 31/2 years. The decline of print ads has dropped to 6% during this period.

General Electric Co. has also reported a recovery in the local ad market and the percentage of growth is quite substantial.

The first two months of the quarter were good for Yahoo!, but in the month of June they noticed a sudden drop in the ad spend of several of their advertisers. Though the total search advertising revenue fell by 8%, the display advertising sector has shown a growth of 19% compared to the same period last year.

The Omnicom Group Inc. has shown a 4.2% growth of quarterly net income. There overall revenue grew by 5.9% and in the U.S. alone, it grew by 7.4%.

The New York Times has reported a quarterly growth in revenue after a gap of 3 years. Digital ad sales grew by 21% but the print media saw a drop of 6% in advertising generated revenue.

Online ad revenue on Bing has increased Microsoft’s revenue by 19%. Fox Cable Network reported a growth in their advertising revenue. Time Warner Inc. also saw a surge in growth due in part to increased ad revenue.

The newspaper, La Repubblica says that by the end of this year, Google will start a new system, which will require users to pay to access content that is behind a publisher paywall. According to the report, the new platform, called Newspass, is already being tested by Google with a closed group of publishers.

Publishers would be the major beneficiaries of this system, as they will receive the major part of the revenue generated. Google will handle the authentication, support and billing. Publishers will also be able to use a single system to publish their content on desktops, mobiles, tablet PCs and any other platforms.

Users will have a single login across all content sites served by Newspass. Sites will be able to give users the option to pay for long term subscriptions or to make micropayments to access just one article.

Google has neither confirmed nor denied the news. A spokesperson has said, “We’ve consistently said we’re talking with news publishers about ways we can work together, including whether we can help them with technology to power any subscription services they may be thinking of building.”

What makes this development most interesting, though, is its timing. News of this initiative comes at a time when a number of major news publications, such as The New York Times and News Corp-owned The Times and The Sun have either started adopting a paywall for their online versions or intend to do so in the near future.

One does wonder how this system will affect the quality of search results, as it is reasonable to assume, that higher quality information is likely to be categorised as ‘paid content’, while the less interesting stories or second-hand news items from bloggers could be all that remains available for free.

In the first incident, a blogger reported that Apple was launching a laptop for just $800. This was a lie, of course, but was inadvertently repeated by the New York Times, giving far too much credibility to that lie.

What one blogger wrote may not have carried much weight by itself, but something written in a reputable publication such as the New York Times, which has a huge circulation, was read by a very large number of people and also believed to be true.

Given the present market conditions, most readers thought of this as a very good offer, and rushed to buy this new laptop. This initially raised the price of Apple’s stock, but when the truth came to light, the prices dropped sharply.

Only two weeks later, a young 18 year old blogger reported that Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, had suffered a heart attack. This not-so-innocent lie was again unwittingly repeated by Henry Blodget on the CNN website and soon Apple stock holders were running for cover, thus causing another dip in the stock prices.

An investigation is being conducted, to see if the blogger was trying to make some money by manipulating the stock prices. So far no evidence has been found to prove it. While those in favour of non-censorship of blogs, have so far maintained that blogging is a harmless activity, and allows one to express ones thoughts and feelings without interference, these incidents will force free speech proponents to look at another aspect to blogging, wherein lies can be intentionally spread and eventually cause untold harm.

The more important lesson, though, should be learned by so-called “journalists” at the major news channels who print any random gossip without even investigating how true it is.