Barnes & Noble Signs Lease for New Manhattan Store; 555 Fifth Avenue Store Will Open in the...

NEW YORK -- Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE:BKS), the world's largest bookseller, announced it has signed a lease agreement to open a new New York City Barnes & Noble bookstore in Manhattan. The more than 34,000-square-foot store, expected to open in the fall of 2005, will be located at 555 Fifth

Avenue at 45th Street. The current Barnes & Noble store in Rockefeller Center (600 Fifth Avenue at 48th Street) will close at the end of January 2007 when its lease expires. The new and bigger bookstore will offer Barnes & Noble's full range of products, including a cafe serving Starbucks coffee, a comprehensive music and DVD department, and a larger space for author events. The store will stock close to 200,000 book, music, DVD and magazine titles.

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 will feature:

--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 5 percent off already discounted prices 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.

About Barnes & Noble, Inc.

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE:BKS), the world's largest bookseller and a Fortune 500 company, operates 840 bookstores in 49 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 e-commerce business through Barnes & Noble.com (www.bn.com), which is ranked fifth in traffic among retailers with their own Web site, according to Media Metrix, 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 1,300 new titles a year and has an active list of over 6,000 titles.

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