This week, The Drill Down team (and Techmeme‘s Lidija Davis) discusses Barnes & Noble‘s new partnership with Microsoft to compete with Amazon‘s Kindle & Apple‘s iPad, and later we discuss a development which could spell the end for Digg.com, one of the most venerated social news sites on the internet.

But first the headlines…CISPA passes the House (and how that will affect you), Apple sidesteps billions in taxes, The Pirate Bay must be blocked in the UK, Blackberry launches version 10 OS, Facebook adds organ donor status to profiles.

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Dark Horse Comics continues to grow their digital market when they announced on Monday that they would be bringing digital editions of their comics line to both Barnes and Noble‘s Nook and the Kobo Vox eReaders.

eReaders are one of the top consumer gadgets from the iPad to the Kindle, so it’s no surprise that a comic book publisher would be attempting to gather more ground in that format. Recently, we’ve seen plenty of publishers announce that their comics would be available throughout a variety of eReaders and Dark Horse continues to add to their availability. With this announcement, Dark Horse made titles like Mass Effect, Sin City, Star Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Hellboy, and many others available to an even wider audience.

Marvel Comics announced this week that the popular comics company would be bringing collected digital editions of their line of graphic novels to both the upcoming Barnes and Noble Nook tablet, as well as the Nook Color.

With the release of Barnes and Noble’s Nook tablet hitting stores (and digital storefronts) next week, considering the success of digital comics, it was only a matter of time before we heard some news regarding comics on the device. Do you remember when DC Comics took their digital collections exclusively to Amazon’s Kindle line, and then how Barnes and Noble got all mad that they didn’t get to play with DC’s toys? Well, it looks like Marvel has stepped in to fill the hole in Barnes and Noble’s heart.

Hey you lot, remember when DC Comics announced that they would be bringing 100 digital graphic novels exclusively to the Kindle Fire? I do, too! Well, apparently Barnes and Noble heard about this (they must read my work), and got all angry and decided that it would be in their best interest to pull each of these DC books from their physical store shelves, because… I’m sorry it really doesn’t make sense to me.