Barnes & Noble Announces Plans for Tikatok, an Award Winning Children’s Publishing Website

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, announced its plans today for Tikatok (www.tikatok.com), an award winning children’s book publishing website, which it acquired in September 2009. Created in collaboration with a team recruited from MIT University, Tikatok is the first Internet publishing platform for children.

The Tikatok site, which serves parents with children between the ages of 5 and 12, offers a safe studio environment for budding child authors, complete with a unique, patent-pending StorySparks™ system that helps to walk children through the process of creating and writing stories.

Barnes & Noble said its plans include a series of piloted events for kids in various Barnes & Noble stores throughout the country, in which children will learn the process of writing, illustrating and publishing their own books. Events will take place on the following dates: Saturday, February 6, at 11 a.m. at the Barnes & Noble in Framingham, Massachusetts; Wednesday, February 17, at 5 p.m. at the Barnes & Noble in Cherry Hill, New Jersey; Friday, March 12, at 12:30 p.m. at the Upper East Side Barnes & Noble in New York City; and Sunday, April 11, at 1 p.m. at the Barnes & Noble in Oxford Valley, Pennsylvania.

The Cherry Hill, New Jersey, event on February 17, will feature a unique book from Tikatok with a “Living Green” theme that children will be able to personalize with their own ideas about how to live green. The Tikatok team will be on hand to take children’s photos and bios, upload them to the Tikatok website, and show kids how books can be customized by the author.

“Tikatok gives parents an easy-to-use and fun online resource to enable their kids to create, publish and print their wonderful stories,” said William Lynch, President of Barnes & Noble.com. “Barnes & Noble has always promoted kids’ creativity and fostered their imaginations and a love of reading. Now, with our award winning Tikatok Children’s Publishing platform, parents and teachers can cultivate budding young storytellers to create, print and share their creations with families, friends and classmates.”

Parents find that Tikatok fosters creativity and builds children’s self-confidence and learning skills. Tikatok’s writing tools have been embraced by teachers and other educators as an innovative and creative way to foster a love of reading and writing among children. Hundreds of educators already use Tikatok in classrooms and libraries, and Tikatok’s books have been used as class projects and fundraising tools for schools.

Tikatok aims to unleash children’s creativity and nourish their excitement about writing. The StorySparks™ system was designed to be fun and easy to use, and the high quality of published books provides parents with keepsakes that families will treasure for many years. Parents whose children have completed books can order single or multiple published copies in high-quality hardcover, softcover and electronic formats. Hardcover books begin at $18, softcovers start at $15, and digital copies can be printed for $2.99.

Tikatok gift cards are currently available on Barnes & Noble.com (www.bn.com), in denominations of $25 and $50. These gift cards can be used to print books created on the Tikatok site.

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 nook by Barnes & Noble, 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.

nook is a trademark of Barnes & Noble, Inc.

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