[November 26, 2012]

Barnes & Noble Unveils Holiday Ad Campaign for Highly Acclaimed NOOK® HD and NOOK® HD+

NOOK Media LLC, a subsidiary of Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the leading retailer of content, digital media and educational products, today introduced "Dear Santa" - a new spot in the holiday advertising campaign designed to shine a light on the family appeal of NOOK HD and NOOK HD+. These new 7- and 9-inch tablets are lightweight, but packed with pixels to deliver text, graphics and video with stunning HD clarity so every book, magazine, movie and app looks better than ever before. Add new family-friendly features like NOOK Catalog^™ and NOOK Scrapbook^™, and you have the very best reading and entertainment tablets for the whole family to share.

In addition to the unmatched reading experience with beautifully rendered text and magazines in spectacular HD, NOOK Catalog offers convenient browsing and shopping capabilities through a selection of colorful, complimentary catalogs from leading retailers including Pottery Barn, L.L.Bean, Frontgate, Garnet Hill and Harry & David - with 100 of the most popular catalogs available this holiday. New catalogs are delivered directly to devices so customers can virtually flip through the pages to explore, tap on a product of interest for more information from the retailer's Web site and make a purchase. Plus, the new NOOK Scrapbook feature makes it easy to rip and save select pages in a personalized collection along with other chosen pages saved from catalogs and magazines.

"Dear Santa" offers a contemporary take on making wish lists for the holidays. Years ago, kids would break out paper catalogs and highlight the items they wanted to add to their holiday wish list. Now, through NOOK Scrapbook, kids have a whole new way to do what they've always done. The campaign starts with a young girl and her mother perusing an American Girl magazine in striking HD clarity on NOOK HD. Mom clips and saves items that catch her daughter's eye and together, they begin to assemble a wish list. After Mom walks away, the girl starts using the device on her own and flips through magazines and catalogs to create a NOOK Scrapbook she titles "Dear Santa." Mom then finds the NOOK HD addressed "North Pole" in their mailbox. Through this whimsical story, the campaign translates technology into a simple truth - NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ are about the joy of reading and the ability to share that joy with those you love.

"NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ are not only the best tablets for reading and entertainment, but also the best tablets for families, and 'Dear Santa' was designed to tell the whole story," said Glenn Kaplan, Creative Director at Barnes & Noble. "The execution captures the excitement and spirit of the season through the magic of our unique scrapbooking feature, all through the eyes, and experience, of a child."

"Dear Santa" will supplement the current "Share" spot, focused on another family-friendly feature: NOOK Profiles, which makes it easy to create individual profiles for every member of the family. As with "Share," "Dear Santa" was developed by Barnes & Noble with advertising partner Mullen and directed by Todd Field of Smuggler, with visual effects by Logan NY.

Both spots, which can be viewed at www.youtube.com/NOOK, are scheduled for over 1.2 billion impressions nationally, across all major networks (ABC, NBC Universal (News - Alert), CBS, Fox and The CW) plus cable networks (e.g. Food Network, HGTV, Bravo), during all top-rated network shows. This unprecedented television media buy will include broadcast on primetime programming like The Voice, X-Factor, Dancing with the Stars, Grey's Anatomy, 2 Broke Girls, The Mindy Project, The New Normal, The Good Wife,Survivor, Nashville and many others. From a digital perspective, "Dear Santa" will be distributed through online video. The spot will be targeted to reach loyal "Pinterest" users who convey a heavy interest in scrapbooking.

Just in time for the holiday season, the new NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ are optimized to deliver unparalleled experiences in the areas that company research showed NOOK tablet owners use most: reading, Web, video and email. The reading experience is unmatched, offering beautifully rendered text, magazines in spectacular HD and lightning fast page turns. In fact, NOOK HD boasts the world's highest-resolution ever on a 7-inch tablet and NOOK HD+ has a stunning 9-inch full HD display. Thanks to top-end processors, the newly designed Web browser in NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ is super-fast, making it simple and smooth to surf favorite sites with a tap, pinch and zoom. New to the Web, ArticleView^™ allows you to customize your online reading experience. Both NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ offer access to a collection of popular movies and TV shows through new NOOK Video. And an all-new built-in email app offers new features in an easy-to-use, clean format that supports a host of popular personal and work-related email services including Microsoft^® Exchange ActiveSync.

Starting at the low prices of $199 for NOOK HD and $269 for NOOK HD+, nearly half the cost of the leading large-format tablet, both products deliver an amazing value for customers. NOOK HD is available in "Snow" and "Smoke" and NOOK HD+ is available in "Slate." Experience the entire NOOK family of products at www.nook.com or at the NOOK Digital Shops and displays in one of Barnes & Noble's more than 700 bookstores and other leading retailers including Best Buy, Target (News - Alert) and Walmart. Barnes & Noble offers Always Free NOOK Support in all of its neighborhood bookstores, with more than 40,000 NOOKsellers across the country ready to assist customers with setting up their NOOK devices or choosing their next great read.

About Barnes & Noble, Inc.

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE:BKS) is a Fortune 500 company and the leading retailer of content, digital media and educational products. The company operates 689 Barnes & Noble bookstores in 50 states, and one of the Web's largest e-commerce sites, BN.com (www.bn.com). Its NOOK Media LLC subsidiary is a leader in the emerging digital reading and digital education markets. The NOOK digital business offers award-winning NOOK^® products and an expansive collection of digital reading and entertainment content through the NOOK Store^™ (www.nook.com), while Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, LLC operates 667 bookstores serving over 4.6 million students and faculty members at colleges and universities across the United States. Barnes & Noble is proud to be named a J.D. Power and Associated 2012 Customer Service Champion and is only one of 50 U.S. companies so named. Barnes & Noble.com is ranked the number one online retailer in customer satisfaction in the book, music and video category and a Top 10 online retailer overall in customer satisfaction according to ForeSee E-Retail Satisfaction Index (Spring Top 100 Edition).

General information on Barnes & Noble, Inc. can be obtained via the Internet by visiting the company's corporate website: www.barnesandnobleinc.com.

NOOK^®, NOOK Store^™, NOOK Video^™, NOOK Video Apps^™ are trademarks of Barnes & Noble, Inc. Other trademarks referenced in this release are the property of their respective owners.

Follow Barnes & Noble on Twitter (News - Alert) (www.bn.com/twitter), Facebook (www.facebook.com/barnesandnoble) and YouTube (News - Alert) (www.youtube.com/user/bnstudio).

About NOOK Media LLC

NOOK reading and entertainment products make it easy to read what you love, anywhere you like^™ with a fun, easy-to-use and immersive digital reading experience. With NOOK, customers gain access to the expansive NOOK Store^™ of more than 3 million digital books, plus periodicals, comics, apps, movies and TV shows, and the ability to enjoy content across a wide array of popular devices through free NOOK Reading Apps^™ and NOOK Video apps, available at www.nook.com/freenookapps. NOOK owners receive Always Free NOOK Support in any of Barnes & Noble's nearly 700 bookstores. Find NOOK devices in Barnes & Noble stores and online at www.nook.com, as well as leading retailers including Best Buy (News - Alert), Walmart, Target and many others. NOOK products will also soon be available in the United Kingdom through�www.nook.co.uk�and�leading retailers.

For more information on NOOK, follow us on www.twitter.com/nookBN or www.twitter.com/nook_UK and www.facebook.com/nook.

[ InfoTech Spotlight's Homepage ]