Barnes & Noble Partners with Asda To Offer Award-Winning NOOK® Products

Leading UK Supermarket to Offer NOOK Reading Experience and Products to Millions of Customers Across the Country in Shops and Online this Autumn

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--NOOK Media LLC, a subsidiary of Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the leading retailer of content, digital media and educational products, has announced a partnership with one of the UK’s largest supermarket chains, Asda. Through the partnership, the award-winning NOOK reading experience and digital products will be available as the exclusive Reader in over 300 Asda stores across the UK and online from Asda Direct.

“At Asda we always aim to deliver the best in value and quality to our customers. Partnering with Barnes & Noble gives us an opportunity to add great value, high quality devices to our offering.”

Asda will feature the NOOK portfolio of products, including the award-winning NOOK Simple Touch^™ and NOOK Simple Touch GlowLight^™, which are available to pre-order online from today, and to experience first-hand in-store from late October. The NOOK Simple Touch is the easiest-to-use Reader with the world’s best, most paper-like reading screen, and the NOOK Simple Touch GlowLight adds an evenly distributed and adjustable light that is perfect for reading in the dark.

Both lightweight devices feature built-in access via Wi-Fi to Barnes & Noble’s digital catalogue of more than 2.5 million digital titles, including top-selling UK books, newspapers and magazines.

As well as these critically-acclaimed devices, Asda customers will also be able to buy the newly-announced super-fast and lightweight 7-inch NOOK^® HD and 9-inch NOOK^® HD+ Tablets on Asda Direct and in a selection of Asda stores when available in November.

“Asda is a successful British retailer that puts value and customer service at the forefront of its business, we feel that it is a great brand fit for NOOK,” said Jamie Iannone, President NOOK Media LLC. “It has significant scale in the UK and we look forward to offering our award-winning products to their millions of discerning customers.”

Andrew Thompson, technology expert at Asda, commented: “At Asda we always aim to deliver the best in value and quality to our customers. Partnering with Barnes & Noble gives us an opportunity to add great value, high quality devices to our offering.”

Barnes & Noble’s partnership with Asda is another demonstration of the bookseller’s commitment to offer the best choice in reading and digital products and outstanding customer service for UK consumers. It will expand the expected number of UK retail outlets to over 2,500 and include various leading online retail platforms offering NOOK products as well as the company’s UK online storefront, www.nook.co.uk.

Further product, pricing and availability details will be announced soon. Commercial terms of the partnership have not been disclosed.

Barnes & Noble conducts its commercial European operations In Luxembourg through its Luxembourg entity Barnes & Noble S.à r.l.

About Barnes & Noble, Inc.

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE:BKS) is a Fortune 500 company and the leading retailer of content, digital media and educational products. The company operates 689 Barnes & Noble bookstores in 50 states, and one of the Web’s largest e-commerce sites, BN.com (www.bn.com). Its NOOK Media LLC subsidiary is a leader in the emerging digital reading and digital education markets. The NOOK digital business offers award-winning NOOK^® products and an expansive collection of digital reading and entertainment content through the NOOK Store^™ (www.nook.com), while Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, LLC operates 667 bookstores serving over 4.6 million students and faculty members at colleges and universities across the United States. Barnes & Noble is proud to be named a J.D. Power and Associated 2012 Customer Service Champion and is only one of 50 U.S. companies so named. Barnes & Noble.com is ranked the number one online retailer in customer satisfaction in the book, music and video category and a Top 10 online retailer overall in customer satisfaction according to ForeSee E-Retail Satisfaction Index (Spring Top 100 Edition).

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

NOOK^®, NOOK Store^™, NOOK Video^™, NOOK Video Apps^™ are trademarks of Barnes & Noble, Inc. Other trademarks referenced in this release are the property of their respective owners.

Follow Barnes & Noble on Twitter (www.bn.com/twitter), Facebook (www.facebook.com/barnesandnoble) and YouTube (www.youtube.com/user/bnstudio).

About NOOK Media LLC

NOOK reading and entertainment products make it easy to read what you love, anywhere you like^™ with a fun, easy-to-use and immersive digital reading experience. With NOOK, customers gain access to the expansive NOOK Store^™ of more than 3 million digital books, plus periodicals, comics, apps, movies and TV shows, and the ability to enjoy content across a wide array of popular devices through free NOOK Reading Apps^™ and NOOK Video apps, available at www.nook.com/freenookapps. NOOK owners receive Always Free NOOK Support in any of Barnes & Noble’s nearly 700 bookstores. Find NOOK devices in Barnes & Noble stores and online at www.nook.com, as well as leading retailers including Best Buy, Walmart, Target and many others. NOOK products are available in the United Kingdom through www.nook.co.uk and leading retailers.

For more information on NOOK, follow us on www.twitter.com/nookBN or www.twitter.com/nook_UK and www.facebook.com/nook.

About Asda

Founded in the 1960s, Asda today is one of Britain’s leading retailers. It has over 180,000 dedicated Asda colleagues serving customers from 542 stores, including 32 Supercentres, 309 Superstores, 27 Asda Living stores, 174 Supermarkets, 25 depots and seven recycling centres across the UK.

It has its main home office in Leeds, Yorkshire and its George clothing division based in Lutterworth, Leicestershire.

Asda serves over 18 million shoppers a week in store and its growing home shopping business at www.asda.com serves 98 per cent of UK homes.

Its Asda Price Guarantee, launched in 2011, gives customers the reassurance that a basket of groceries will always be 10 per cent better value than competitors. Powered by MySupermarket.co.uk, the APG is the only independent, transparent online grocery price-checker in the world.

Asda joined Walmart, the world’s number one retailer, in 1999.