Barnes & Noble is sweetening the pot on their Nook Tablet by offering it for $99…with strings attached, of course. To get that juicy price you need purchase a 1-year subscription to the New York Times Nook Edition.

Or, if you don’t want the tablet, you can get a Nook Simple Touch for free. A subscription to the New York Times will set you back $19.99/month for one year.

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In non-ebook news, Barnes & Noble is joining the fight to end bullying. You’ve probably seen the tragic news stories of young children taking their own lives because they were bullied to the breaking point. I’m happy to see B&N stepping up to the plate on this issue.

I received this press release from Barnes & Noble and thought I’d share it with you:

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As expected, ebook sales were up again in August. This time, sales jumped 116%. Not too shabby. There’s really not much more to add here. I’ll let the Publishers Weekly article speak for itself:

E-book sales from publishers that report to the AAP rose 116.5% in August, to $88.8 million, compared to August 2010. The gain marked an acceleration in e-book growth compared to July when sales of the format increased 105%, the slowest in 2011. All trade print segments had a decline in August sales with the largest coming in mass market paperback where sales from reporting companies fell 36.4%. Sales of digital audio rose 30.2% at 12 digital audio publishers.

For the first eight months of 2011, e-book sales increased 144.4%, to $649.2 million, from 18 reporting publishers to the AAP monthly statistics program. 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.

Looks like we are finally seeing the fallout from the liquidation of Borders Booksellers. Publishers Weekly is reporting that July bookstore sales were down 4%:

The impact of the closing of Borders’s stores is starting to show up in industry numbers. According to preliminary estimates released Wednesday morning by the Census Bureau, bookstore sales fell 4.2% in July, the steepest decline in 2011. Sales dropped to $982 million from $1.02 billion in July 2010. The July decline followed a 1.9% drop in June and as a result bookstore sales for the first seven months of 2011 were down 0.5%, to $8.03 billion.

Sales for the entire retail segment rose 6.2% in July and 7.9% for the first seven months of 2011.

It will be interesting to see how bookstore sales do after the fallout from Borders comes to an end. I’m predicting print book sales will continue to decline while ebook sales will increase.

Barnes & Noble issued a press release with their Q1 earnings. As expected, print sales continued to take a dive. It looks more and more like B&N is being propped up by their Nook eReader and digital book sales.

I’m not sure if digital sales alone will be enough to keep the bookseller alive, but it goes without saying that it doesn’t hurt.

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I was in the locker room at my local gym last night after an invigorating swim, getting ready to go home. When I’m in the locker room I usually try to get in and get out as fast as possible.

But as I was changing, I couldn’t help but overhear two guys with lockers close to mine talking about the downfall of Borders Booksellers. They lamented how sad it was that the chain had gone bankrupt (which I agree, it is sad). Then they listed, what they thought, were the reasons for Borders’ downfall:

1. Apple’s iPad

2. Ebooks in general

3. Amazon.com

I desperately wanted to tell them that they were wrong. Dead wrong. I wanted to tell them that Borders began their descent into bankruptcy back in the 90s. That it was a slow fall.

My general shyness in public, and my strict rule about not talking to other guys changing in the locker room, prevented me from saying anything. That, and I was in a hurry to get home. If I was a good promoter, however, I would have had a business card with this blog on it and I would have told them to read my blog.

While this was only one isolated incident, I do see it as further anecdotal evidence that people are blaming ebooks (and Amazon) for the fall of Borders. I’ve written many posts here about why Borders went belly-up.

I hate to keep kicking Borders after they’ve already fallen, but their downfall is a great study how not to run a book chain, or any retail chain for that matter. It’s easy to blame ebooks and/or Amazon for their failure. I’ve already argued that ebooks and Amazon really weren’t the reason why Borders failed.

What was the bookseller’s biggest enemy? Borders themselves. That’s right. I’ve maintained that it was their own bad business decisions that brought about their downfall. And the following comes from a former Borders employee and seems to had further evidence supporting this theory:

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Retail expert Howard Davidowitz says that the death blow to Borders Group Inc was when they turned over control of their website to Amazon back in 2001.

Not to toot my own horn, but I speculated the same thing in my last post about the Borders saga. They essentially gave their business to Amazon, which then proceeded to eat them alive.

Here’s the video featuring an interview with Howard Davidowitz. He not only gives his opinion about why Borders collapsed, but what will happen to all that retail space that will soon be vacant.

We’ve now heard the death rattle of the Borders book chain and are waiting for the two liquidation companies that bought the bookseller out to throw the dirt on its grave.

But how did Borders get to this point? I’m willing to bet a lot of people will place the blame squarely on ebooks. And I’m willing to bet that they are wrong.

The downfall of Borders began, not with ebooks, but with a series of bad management choices going back over a decade. Here are a few highlights:

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UPDATE: It’s official. TheStreet.com is now reporting that Borders will begin to liquidate this week. 399 stores will be shut and will result in roughly 10,700 layoffs. More to come…

The deadline for bids came and went Sunday afternoon with no bidder coming out of the woods to save Borders Booksellers. That means the company will likely be liquidated, starting this week.

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