Barnes & Noble Expands B&N Recommends Program to Include Trade Paperbacks

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, today announced that it has expanded the successful Barnes & Noble Recommends (www.bn.com/recommends) program to include trade paperbacks. Barnes & Noble stores will feature the buyers’ picks of the best paperback reprints and trade paperback originals with the B&N Recommends endorsement. On sale today are the picks for September: Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls and Traveling With Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd.

Barnes & Noble buyers will select two trade paperback recommendations per month, one each in fiction and non-fiction. The books chosen will be prominently featured in Barnes & Noble stores across the country.

“Since we launched the Barnes & Noble Recommends program four years ago for hardcover titles it has been a huge success, exposing readers to bestsellers like Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, and Child 44 by Tom Robb Smith,” said Patricia Bostelman, vice president of marketing for Barnes & Noble, Inc. “Trade paperbacks are the format of choice for many of our bookstore customers and we’re excited to be able to expand the Recommends program and suggest great titles selected by our knowledgeable and passionate booksellers.”

Jeannette Walls’ Half Broke Horses is a historical novel based on the life of Lily Casey Smith, Walls’ indomitable grandmother who, at 15-years old, rode 500 miles on horseback through the Arizona desert – alone – to take her first job as a teacher. She survived floods, tornadoes, droughts and a bigamist husband. Half Broke Horses is written in Lily’s voice, through which you feel the zest for life of this plain-spoken, yet passionate woman who lived an astonishingly hardscrabble life. Despite its hair-raising moments, Half Broke Horses is ultimately a loving portrait of an adventurous grandmother.

Sue Monk Kidd, the author of the incredible bestsellers, Secret Life of Bees and The Mermaid Chair, has written a poignant memoir with her daughter Ann Kidd Taylor. Traveling With Pomegranates alternates between Sue and Ann as they travel together to Greece and France between 1998 and 2000. During that time – pre-Secret Life of Bees – Sue is stumped in the creative process while writing her first novel and Ann has recently graduated from college and is in the throes of depression. The two struggle as individuals in different stages of their lives and with each other. Their slow and steady path toward reconnection is the narrative framework in which this story hangs.

Barnes & Noble Recommends “Main Selections” are chosen by the company’s booksellers from across the country. Each selection is a book that Barnes & Noble recommends unconditionally, believes is “unputdownable” and is especially appropriate for book discussion groups. The books can be discussed online at www.bn.com/recommends.

ABOUT BARNES & NOBLE, INC.

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world's largest bookseller and a Fortune 500 company, operates 717 bookstores in 50 states. Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Barnes & Noble, also operates 633 college bookstores serving nearly 4 million students and faculty members at colleges and universities across the United States. Barnes & Noble is the nation's top bookseller brand for the seventh 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 more than one million titles in its eBookstore (www.bn.com/ebooks). Through Barnes & Noble’s NOOKTM eReading product offering, customers can buy and read eBooks on the widest range of platforms, including NOOK eBook Readers, devices from partner companies, and hundreds of the most popular mobile and computing devices using free NOOK software.

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