Barnes & Noble First to Offer Multi-Channel Textbook Rental Program

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, announced today that it has created a multi-channel textbook rental program for college students that could result in millions of dollars of savings for college students across America. Barnes & Noble College is the first nationwide bookseller to offer a multi-channel program.

“We’ve always been about providing our students with convenient, cost-saving textbook options. We think our rental program does just that and has the additional benefit of providing an online solution”

Barnes & Noble College has made the program easy for students, enabling them to rent their textbooks from the comfort of their dorm or home simply by logging into their campus bookstore’s e-commerce site. They can also rent from their campus Barnes & Noble bookstore. This innovative rental program gives students the added flexibility of paying for their rentals using any form of tender, including campus debit cards and student financial aid.

At the beginning of the 2009 fall semester, Barnes & Noble College said it was test piloting the rental program in 3 of its 636 campus bookstores. Since then, the program has expanded to 25 of their campus bookstores including The Ohio State University, The University of Maryland, Borough of Manhattan Community College and University of South Carolina.

“We’ve had a tremendous response from students and faculty to our rental program and as a result have continued to expand it to other colleges and universities across the country,” said Max Roberts, President of Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, LLC. “What makes our program so unique is that we’ve made saving on textbooks even easier for students by providing them the option of ordering their rentals online and having them shipped or picked up at their campus bookstore.”

Rentals are just the newest addition to the list of options Barnes & Noble College is offering students, including digital, loose leaf, custom, new, used, and unbundled textbooks. “We’ve always been about providing our students with convenient, cost-saving textbook options. We think our rental program does just that and has the additional benefit of providing an online solution,” said Roberts.

Textbook rentals are increasingly becoming a popular option for students looking to reduce their educational expenses. Rented textbooks save students more than 50% of the cost of buying a new, printed textbook.

In the coming months, Barnes & Noble will dedicate significant resources to expanding its rental program to more of the colleges and universities it serves. Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, LLC, is the largest operator of college and university bookstores in the country operating more than 636 campus bookstores that serve nearly four million students and 250,000 faculty.

About Barnes & Noble, Inc.

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller and a Fortune 500 company, operates 775 bookstores in 50 states. Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Barnes & Noble, also operates 636 college bookstores serving nearly 4 million students and over 250,000 faculty members at colleges and universities across the United States. Barnes & Noble is the nation’s top bookseller brand for the sixth year in a row, as determined by a combination of the brand’s performance on familiarity, quality, and purchase intent; the top bookseller in quality for the second year in a row and the number two retailer in trust, 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, which also features hundreds of thousands of titles in its eBookstore (www.bn.com/ebooks). Customers can buy and read eBooks on a wide range of platforms, including the iPhone and iPod touch, BlackBerry^®smartphones, as well as most Windows^® and Mac^® laptops or full-sized desktop computers.

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

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