Barnes & Noble Axes Nook Engineers

Barnes & Noble's Nook was already on death's door, and things look even more grim today after news broke that the company had laid off the tablet's hardware engineers. Initially, Business Insider reported that the company had fired its entire engineering staff for the product. The company later told Ars Technica that wasn't true, and that it hadn't laid off all the engineers, but it didn't provide specific numbers, and confirmed that there had been bloodletting.

"As we've aligned Nook's cost structure with business realities, staffing levels in certain areas of our organization have changed, leading to some job eliminations," a spokesperson said, adding that the company was still committed to the tablet. But Kwame Opam at The Verge thinks "the writing is on the wall" for the Nook, given that sales dropped 66.7% year-over-year this holiday season. (More Nook stories.)