The e-book/e-reader wars are really heating up. Amazon has plenty of good news to share around its Kindle device. Now Barnes & Noble is talking about a major push to increase Nook sales.

Julie Bosman with the New York Times reports that in September, the company will start putting a great deal of emphasis on Nook in its brick and mortar stores, and that could go a long way in helping it compete with Amazon's increasingly successful Kindle.

According to Bosman, the Nook's physical in-store presence will include 1,000-square-foot boutiques in all B&N stores with sample Nook devices, demo tables, video screens, and employees giving Nook-related advice and instructions to customers.

"By devoting more floor space to promoting the Nook, Barnes & Noble is playing up what it calls a crucial advantage over Amazon in the e-reader war: its 720 bricks-and-mortar stores, where customers can test out the device before they commit to buying it," she writes.

Nook made a big impact in June when it dropped the price of its 3G version to $199 (along with the release of a new Wi-Fi version of the device). Not to be outdone, Amazon quickly dropped the price of its Kindle from $259 to $189.

This week, Amazon introduced a new generation of Kindles, including a cheaper Wi-Fi version. The price of the new smaller 3G + Wi-Fi Kindle is $189, while the Wi-Fi only version costs $139.

Amazon recently announced that it had sold more Kindle e-books than hardback books. Now the company is claiming that they'll outsell paperbacks as soon as next year.

I would not be surprising to see Amazon make a quick push to sell more Kindles before B&N can get its physical boutiques ready. After all, customers who already own a Kindle are less likely to be in the market for a Nook. We'll see what Amazon's next move is.

The USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism has released a study (pdf) this week looking at the impact the web has on Americans, and among the nearly 200 issues explored is that of paying for online services and content.

Believe it or not, most don't want to pay. For example, the study found that 49% of respondents have used free micro-blogs like Twitter, but "zero percent" said they would be willing to pay to use them.

Would you pay to use Twitter if it charged a fee? Let us know.

"Such an extreme finding that produced a zero response underscores the difficulty of getting Internet users to pay for anything that they already receive for free," said Jeffrey I. Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the school.

"Twitter has no plans to charge its users, but this result illustrates, beyond any doubt, the tremendous problem of transforming free users into paying users," added Cole. "Online providers face major challenges to get customers to pay for services they now receive for free."

Obviously this is an obstacle some newspaper publishers are hoping to overcome. Last week, reports surfaced that News Corp's The Times' site visits fell to a third of what they were when it began requiring users to pay.

"Internet users can obtain content in three ways: they can steal it, or pay for it, or accept advertising on the Web pages they view," said Cole. "Users express strong negative views about online advertising, but they still prefer seeing ads as an alternative to paying for content. Consumers really want free content without advertising, but ultimately they understand that content has to be paid for -- one way or another."

WikiLeaks has also shown how far the web can go when it comes to free, important content. By making over 90,000 Afghanistan war-related documents available to the public, readers are treated to an escalating plethora of free analysis to choose from (not to mention the raw source material).

What content is worth paying for? Tell us what you think.

Individuals who want to invest in Facebook probably won't have an opportunity to do so for well over a year.  A new, somewhat credible report indicates that the company won't go public until sometime in 2012.

"Three people familiar with the matter" spoke to Bloomberg, and said the delay will give Mark Zuckerberg "more time to gain users and boost sales."  The second part of that claim is believable; the first half, less so.

But Bloomberg presumably wasn't just interviewing random grocery shoppers in Palo Alto, and the article continued, "Facebook would benefit from another year of growth absent the added scrutiny that comes with a public listing, instead of holding an IPO in 2011 as investors speculated, said the people . . ."

Lots of evidence supports that idea, too.  Paul Ceglia's not-yet-disproven claims of ownership wouldn't do a public company any good, for example, and the release of The Social Network will hardly equate to positive PR.

Plus, Zuckerberg himself might not be ready to handle the challenge.  Consider that he said at the Cannes Liones International Advertising Festival that running a public company probably wouldn't be too different from running a private one.  Audience members laughed in response.

Another benefit of delaying the IPO will be that Facebook can give the market more time to recover.  It must be a rare company that would want to go public when there are good odds of the Dow crashing the same day.

According to a report released by Barracuda Labs, Google has twice as much malware than Bing, Yahoo, and Twitter put together. The study was conducted across these web properties over a two-month period.

Barracuda says it reviewed over 25,000 trending topics and nearly 5.5 million search results, analyzing them to identify the types of topics used by malware distributors. The firm will be presenting its findings at DefCON 18 this weekend, but the report is available here (pdf). Barracuda lists the following as highlights from its findings:

- Overall, Google takes the crown for malware distribution -- turning up more than twice the amount of malware as Bing, Twitter and Yahoo! combined when searches on popular trending topics were performed. Google presents at 69 percent; Yahoo! at 18 percent; Bing at 12 percent; and Twitter at one percent.

- The average amount of time for a trending topic to appear on one of the major search engines after appearing on Twitter varies tremendously: 1.2 days for Google, 4.3 days for Bing, and 4.8 days for Yahoo!

- Over half of the malware found was between the hours of 4:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. GMT.

- The top 10 terms used by malware distributors include the name of a NFL player, three actresses, a Playboy Playmate and a college student who faked his way into Harvard.

- In general, activity is increasing on Twitter: more users are coming online; True Twitter Users are tweeting more often, and even casual users are becoming more active. As users become more active, the malicious activity also increases.

- Only 28.87 percent of Twitter users are actual True Twitter Users.

- Half of Twitter users tweet less than once a day, yet one in 10 users tweet five or more times a day and 30 percent of Twitter accounts have never tweeted.

-  One in every eight Twitter users has at least 10 times more followers than they are following.

-  Only one in 10 users is following more than 100 users, and almost half are following less than five.

- The Twitter Crime Rate for the first half of 2010 was 1.67 percent.

"Our study shows that attackers have serious efforts devoted towards getting in front of the billions of eyeballs that are using search engines everyday and the millions of users that are connecting on social networks like Twitter," said Dr. Paul Judge, chief research officer and VP at Barracuda Networks. "Therefore, we continue to analyze their approaches and build new techniques to find them and protect users."

NetworkWorld points to some market share numbers, which seem to mirror the malware percentages presented by Barracuda.