Barnes & Noble Inc's second quarter earnings dipped slightly from $1.9 billion to $1. 89 billion compared to last year even as its Nook line of products posted an increase in sales to $220 million.

B&N released their reported earnings for the second quarter that ended on October 29, 2011. Even as its Nook line continued to sell well the company still had a net loss of $6.6 million for the quarter or $0.17 per share.

Barnes & Noble had turned to e-readers and e-books to prop up lagging physical book sales. During the second quarter, brick and mortar stores had overall sales dip 0.6 percent to $1.89. The company saw some relief when rival Borders Inc. liquidated its stores. Barnes & Noble invested heavily in its Nook products and e-books to remain competitive in the market. The move has paid off, somewhat. Sales from its online store, BN.com increased 17 percent from the previous year from $177 million to $ 206 million. The bookseller hasn't released the exact numbers but Barnes & Noble says that its Nook tablet, introduced on November 7, 2011 had become the fastest selling Nook product for Barnes & Noble.

"We expect to sell millions of devices during our third quarter, adding to the millions of current NOOK customers," said William Lynch, CEO of Barnes & Noble.

However developing the Nook tablet and keeping its price at $249 to be competitive with Amazon Inc's Kindle could have led to the financial loss in the second quarter. The company says it plans to invest more in promoting the Nook Table to get more customers. The retailer now expects its full-year earnings to be lower than its estimated earnings of $210 million to $250 million for the year.

The Nook Tablet has a 7-inch, 600x1024 pixel resolution touchscreen. It has a dual-core 1.0 Ghz Texas Instruments processor, 1Gb of RAM and 16 Gb of onboard storage with a microSD slot for expansion up to 32 Gb. The Nook Tablet runs on a customized version of Google's Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system.