Barnes & Noble is making plans to release the Nook Tablet in Europe.

At an event this week called Mobile Monday London, Barnes & Noble gave a marketing presentation explaining that the tablet appeals to moms, who have been nicknamed “Julie.” 

Seeking Alpha has more:

Julie’ does not like to consume apps on phones because she is “a bit afraid of data consumption,” and because of that B&N has found a good way to market apps to her: by making them free when she is in the store to try them out. This, she calls, “approaching the device from a content perspective.”

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In a move to compete more directly with the Kindle Fire, Barnes & Noble has released the $199 8GB Nook Tablet, a 7-inch color screen eReader tablet. Like the Kindle Fire, the new 8GB Nook Tablet has half the storage of the $249 16 GB Nook Tablet.

The space should be plenty for reading eBooks and streaming movies on apps. The company has also dropped the price of the Nook Color to $169.

Barnes & Noble also released its earnings report today and revealed that the Nook business — which includes devices, digital content and accessories – increased 38% during Q4 2011 to $542 million from Q4 2010.

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Barnes & Noble has decided not to stock books published by Amazon in their physical stores, keeping the new publisher out of the country’s largest network of brick and mortar bookstores.

Bloomberg Businessweek senior reporter Brad Stone called it “a declaration of war,” breaking the news with a statement from B&N’s chief merchandising officer, Jaime Carey. The bookseller will offer Amazon titles in their online store. Last week, Amazon revealed that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will distribute print books from Amazon Publishing.

Check it out: “Our decision is based on Amazon’s continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents and the authors they represent. These exclusives have prohibited us from offering certain eBooks to our customers. Their actions have undermined the industry as a whole and have prevented millions of customers from having access to content. It’s clear to us that Amazon has proven they would not be a good publishing partner to Barnes & Noble as they continue to pull content off the market for their own self interest.” (Via Sarah Weinman)

In a long article about the future of Barnes & Noble, New York Times reporter Julie Bosman wrote a gloomy passage imagining a world without the chain bookstore.

Here’s an excerpt: “Certainly, there would be fewer places to sell books. Independents account for less than 10 percent of business, and Target, Walmart and the like carry far smaller selections than traditional bookstores. Without Barnes & Noble, the publishers’ marketing proposition crumbles. The idea that publishers can spot, mold and publicize new talent, then get someone to buy books at prices that actually makes economic sense, suddenly seems a reach. Marketing books via Twitter, and relying on reviews, advertising and perhaps an appearance on the Today show doesn’t sound like a winning plan.”

What do you think–could the publishing industry survive without Barnes & Noble? The article included a staggering comparison between the stock prices of the leading booksellers: Barnes & Noble was valued at $719 million and Amazon was valued at $88 billion.

Barnes & Noble is shifting its focus from device to content, according to Jim Hilt, vice president of e-books at Barnes & Noble who spoke at the Digital Book World conference today.

He said that 2011 was about the device and 2012 is about the content.

“The device is just an entry point at helping consumers do what they already do today, which is read great books and discover content,” he said. “Putting the browsing experience that you can get in a bookstore on a 7-inch display is the challenge of our industry right now.” Read more

In an comprehensive article about the future of Barnes & Noble at the Wall Street Journal, publishers estimated that the bookseller may hold up 27 percent of the eBook marketplace.

Here’s more from the article: “One publisher predicted Thursday that e-books could account for as much as 40% of total revenue by the end of the year. Although Barnes & Noble was late to the game, its devices have won critical praise, and publishers estimate today that it controls as much as 27% of the digital-books market.”

Yesterday Barnes & Noble announced that “the Company has decided to pursue strategic exploratory work to separate the NOOK business.” The news came after the company significantly raised its estimated losses for 2012 as it copes with the costs of maintaining the Nook business. The WSJ article speculated that Google and Microsoft could be potential buyers.

Today novelist John Green acknowledged that B&N.com had accidentally shipped some pre-orders of his highly anticipated novel, The Fault in Our Stars.

Here’s more from the novelist: “The people who made this error were not bad or incompetent people, and they were not acting maliciously. We all make mistakes, and it is not my wish to see Barnes and Noble or any of their employees vilified. If you happen to receive an early copy of The Fault in Our Stars, you should of course feel free to read it. (You should also feel free to wait until January 10th.) But please do not spoil it for other readers. Please don’t share quotes or reveal plot or anything else that might negatively affect other people’s reading experience.”

At his Tumblr blog, Green said he had hoped his readers could all tackle the book together on its January 10th release date. Green spoke at our Publishing App Expo earlier this year, follow this link to read his commentary. (Via Sarah Weinman)

Barnes & Noble reported yesterday that retail sales were down 1 percent during the second quarter compared to the same period last year, dipping from from $931 million to $918 million.

Here’s more from the release: “The consolidated NOOK business across all of the company’s segments, including sales of digital content, device hardware and related accessories, increased 85% in the second quarter to $220 million, on a comparable sales basis.”

The bookseller reported a net loss of $6.6 million for the quarter, significantly less than the $12.6 million loss last year during the same period. At the same time, BN.com saw sales rise 17 percent (to $206 million) and college bookstore sales dropped four percent (to $768 million) for the quarter. (Via Publishers Lunch)

The Barnes & Noble online marketing team sent a mass email to blog editors today, requesting that bloggers change Borders links to Barnes & Noble links.

Here’s an excerpt from the email: “Barnes & Noble recently purchased most of the Borders trademarks and intellectual property in a recent auction. As a result of this purchase, we started transitioning the Borders.com website to Barnesandnoble.com via redirects. We noticed that your site is currently linking to http://www.borders.com, and I’d like to reach out and ask you to kindly update your links to the corresponding URLs on Barnesandnoble.com. We have redirects in place for many Borders.com pages, so you can use that to help you determine the correct landing pages on Barnesandnoble.com.”

What do you think about this mass email? We currently have more than 420 different posts on GalleyCat linking to Borders news, so it is a pretty major request. Follow this link if you want to read more about Barnes & Noble’s purchase of Borders’ intellectual property.

Barnes & Noble hosted a press conference today to release a $249 Nook Tablet device. The new tablet will be faster than the Kindle Fire. The tablet will be the same size as the Kindle Fire (and the old Nook Color), but it will have a high resolution display and 1GB of RAM, versus the 512MB of RAM in the Kindle Fire.

Follow this link for more details. The release will also come with new content partnerships including the ability to stream video from Hulu Plus and music from Rhapsody, MOG and Grooveshark. Barnes & Noble plans will begin preselling the tablets on today and the device will ship and hit stores next week, the same week that the Kindle Fire ships.

The company also lowered the price on the Nook Color, which previously cost $249, to $199. This competes directly with Amazon’s Kindle Fire device. Previously $139, the Nook Touch is now $99, which competes with the Kindle Touch’s ad supported version. The Nook, however, does not have ads.