Publishing News

Bookselling

June 1-15, 2005 Edition BOOKSELLING Barnes & Noble

Opens New Store

in Fort Worth, TX

NEW YORK, NY/06/01/05—Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, opened a new bookstore on June 1 at 4801 Overton Ridge Boulevard, Fort Worth, Texas. Concurrently, Bookstop at 4801 South Hulen Street was closed. The new store stocks close to 200,000 book, music, DVD and magazine titles and includes a cafe serving Starbucks coffee. The new Hulen Barnes & Noble will be open from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Sunday and employ approximately 75 people from the community.

Barnes & Noble’s bookselling innovations have established it as America’s top retail brand for quality. For the third year in a row, the EquiTrend(R) Brand Study by Harris Interactive(R) named Barnes & Noble number-one in quality among the country’s retail brands. The new store features:

The Barnes & Noble Membership Program. Designed for Barnes & Noble’s best customers, this program gives Members an additional 10 percent off virtually every item in Barnes & Noble stores and online at Barnes & Noble.com. The annual fee is $25. Rapid special-order service. Can’t find it on the shelf? Barnes & Noble’s massive warehouse inventory is available in real-time, enabling its booksellers to order and confirm the availability of over one million titles at the click of a button. Large-scale children’s departments. Bigger than most typical bookstores and stocking over 15,000 titles in an easy-to-browse environment, “Barnes & Noble Jr.” departments are designed to appeal to children, parents, teachers and librarians. Children’s story hours will be held twice a week. Advanced technology music-listening system. The store’s music department will feature RedDotNet, the most advanced listening technology. RedDotNet enables customers to listen to any CD in the store, sampling up to 200,000 music titles by simply passing it under a scanner. Connected to the company’s online electronic music catalog, the store’s listening stations make “browsing with your ears” a reality. Giant Newsstand. The store’s newsstand stocks over 2,000 titles, including hundreds of hard-to-find specialty magazines, out of town and even foreign newspapers. Wi-Fi Service. SBC FreedomLink Wi-Fi service allows customers to use their laptop computers and personal digital assistants anywhere in the store or cafe to communicate online, surf the Internet and connect to corporate networks at speeds 50 to 100 times as fast as a dial-up connection. A single two-hour session costs $3.95, and an annual membership with unlimited access to Barnes & Noble and more than 6,000 SBC Wi-Fi hot spots is available for $19.95 per month.

About Barnes & Noble, Inc.

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller and a Fortune 500 company, operates 821 bookstores in 50 states. For the third year in a row, the company is the nation’s top retail brand for quality, according to the EquiTrend(R) Brand Study by Harris Interactive(R). Barnes & Noble conducts its online business through Barnes & Noble.com ( www.bn.com), one of the Web’s largest e-commerce sites and the number-one brand among e-commerce companies, according to the latest EquiTrend survey. In addition to its retail operations, Barnes & Noble is one of the largest book publishers in the world. Its subsidiary, Sterling Publishing, publishes over 1,100 new titles a year and has an active list of over 5,000 titles.

Barnes & Noble

Opens Store

in Newburgh

NEW YORK, NY/05/19/05—Barnes & Noble has opened a new bookstore in the Town of Newburgh, CA, at the intersection of routes 17K and 300. The Orange County store has been in the planning stage for more than 10 years. Other major tenants in the area include Lowe’s and Pier 1 Imports. A Michaels Crafts store and a TGI Friday’s restaurant are soon to be opened nearby.