Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, announced it has signed a lease agreement to open a new Barnes & Noble bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina. The bookstore, expected to open in March 2009, will be located in the Biltmore Park Town Center at 33 Town Square Boulevard. The store will stock close to 200,000 book, music, DVD and magazine titles, and include a café serving Starbucks coffee.

Barnes & Noble’s bookselling innovations have established it as America’s top retail brand for quality. For the fifth year in a row, the EquiTrend® Brand Study by Harris Interactive® named Barnes & Noble number one in quality among the country’s retail brands. 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 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 three times 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. AT&T Wi-FiSM 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 10,700 AT&T Wi-Fi hot spots is available for $19.95 per month (with a one year commitment).

About Barnes & Noble, Inc.

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller and a Fortune 500 company, operates 793 bookstores in 50 states. For the fifth year in a row, the company is the nation’s top retail brand for quality, 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 and the number one online bookseller for quality among e-commerce companies, according to the latest EquiTrend survey.

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