Barnes & Noble to Open New Store at 2100 Hamilton Place Boulevard Chattanooga, Tennessee

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, will open a new bookstore on November 12 in Hamilton Place Mall at 2100 Hamilton Place Boulevard, Chattanooga, Tennessee. Concurrently, the existing store at 2230 Hamilton Place Boulevard will close. The new store will stock close to 200,000 book, music, DVD and magazine titles and include a café serving Starbucks coffee. The new Hamilton Place 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 50 people from the community.

The public is invited to a Preview Night Party at the new Hamilton Place Barnes & Noble on Tuesday, November 11, from 6 to 9 p.m. A portion of the Preview Night sales will benefit Read 20, which promotes early childhood literacy in Hamilton County. Hamilton County Mayor Claude Ramsey will host a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 6 p.m.; Chattanooga Mayor Ron Littlefield also will attend. Students from Apison Elementary, Barger Academy of Fine Arts, Fairyland Elementary and Thrasher Elementary will perform poetry and reader’s theater pieces throughout the evening. Read 20 will provide face painting and Stewart Payne, Read 20 Readmobile coordinator, will play guitar. For the children, magician and balloon artist Lance Johnson will perform and Curious George will be on hand to meet his fans.

Barnes & Noble is the nation’s top bookseller in quality, and for the fifth year in a row, the top bookseller brand, as determined by a combination of the brand’s performance on familiarity, quality and purchase intent, according to the EquiTrend^® Brand Study by Harris Interactive^®. The new store will feature:

The Barnes & Noble Membership Program. Designed for Barnes & Noble’s best customers, this program gives Members 40% off hardcover fiction and nonfiction bestsellers, 20% off all other adult hardcover books, and 10% off virtually everything else 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 department. Bigger than most typical bookstores and stocking more than 15,000 titles in an easy-to-browse environment, the “Barnes & Noble Jr.” department is designed to appeal to children, parents, teachers and librarians. Children’s Storytime will be held once a week.
Advanced technology movie, audiobook and music-previewing system. The store will feature RedDotNet, the most advanced listening and previewing technology. RedDotNet enables customers to preview select DVDs, Blu-ray Discs, audiobooks or CDs in the store, sampling a title by simply passing it under a scanner. Connected to the company’s online electronic catalog, the store’s listening stations make “browsing with your ears” a reality. Thanks to the latest technology, RedDotNet stations also allow customers to view a three-minute clip of more than 7,000 DVDs. Additional music titles are available for special order.
Giant Newsstand. The store’s newsstand stocks hundreds of hard-to-find specialty magazines, and out-of-town newspapers.
Wi-Fi Service. AT&T Wi-Fi^SM service allows customers to use their laptop computers and personal digital assistants anywhere in the store or café 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 50,000 AT&T Wi-Fi hot spots also is available.
Community Center. The store will serve as a local community center, hosting a number of community events throughout the year. They will include author readings and discussions, book clubs and programs with local literary and cultural organizations. The store also will hold bookfairs, partnering with local schools and other community institutions. For more information, please contact Elizabeth Murphy at (423) 893-5194.

About Barnes & Noble, Inc.

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller and a Fortune 500 company, operates 796 bookstores in 50 states. The company is the nation’s top bookseller in quality, and for the fifth year in a row, the top bookseller brand, as determined by a combination of the brand’s performance on familiarity, quality, and purchase intent, according to the EquiTrend® Brand Study by Harris Interactive®. Barnes & Noble conducts its online business through Barnes & Noble.com (www.bn.com), one of the Web’s largest e-commerce sites.

General information on Barnes & Noble, Inc. can be obtained via the Internet by visiting the company’s corporate website: www.barnesandnobleinc.com.