Barnes & Noble Signs Lease for Mankato, Minnesota, Store; Store Will Open in March 2007.

NEW YORK -- 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 Mankato, Minnesota. The store, expected to open in March 2007, will be located in the River Hills Mall at the intersection of Highway 22 and Highway 14. The day prior to the opening of the new store, the existing Barnes & Noble at 1859 Adams Street in Mankato will close. The existing B. Dalton in the River Hills Mall in Mankato will also close. The new store will stock close to 200,000 book, music, DVD and magazine titles and include a cafe serving Starbucks coffee. E[acute accent]Barnes & Noble's bookselling innovations have established it as America's top retail brand for quality. For the fourth 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 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. SBC FreedomLink Wi-Fi service allows customers
        to use their laptop computers and personal digital assistants
        anywhere in the store or cafe 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 6,000 SBC Wi-Fi hot
        spots is available for $19.95 per month.

E[acute accent]About Barnes & Noble, Inc.

E[acute accent]Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world's largest bookseller and a Fortune 500 company, operates 824 bookstores in 50 states. For the fourth 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 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. E[acute accent]General information on Barnes & Noble, Inc. can be obtained via the Internet by visiting the company's corporate Web site: http://www.barnesandnobleinc.com.