BarnesandNoble.com Launches Book Clubs Center

Posted on March 14, 2003

Barnes & Noble.com has launched its Book Clubs center, a feature on its website that offers the book club community new ideas for what to read next. Each week, the Book Clubs center will feature Barnes & Noble.com editors' recommended title for reading groups. The Book Clubs center will include suggestions from authors, and free printable reading group discussion guides. It also provides advice on how to organize, run and maintain a book club, and information about how to join a group or hold a group meeting at a Barnes & Noble store.

"As the popularity of book clubs has exploded over the years, our customers have increasingly asked us for recommendations about what to read next," said Marie Toulantis, chief executive officer of Barnes & Noble.com. "The Book Clubs center helps them navigate through thousands of great fiction and nonfiction titles to find a book and print out companion reading guides that are sure to inspire interesting debate and enhance the book club experience."

Barnes & Noble.com's first Book Clubs recommendation is Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (Random House Trade Paperback), a memoir about Fuller's life as an English-born child whose family moves to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during its civil struggles in 1972, and the love she develops for the African people and their land. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, first published in December 2001, is newly available in trade paperback, the format of choice for many book clubs.

The Barnes & Noble.com Book Clubs center also has reading recommendations from top authors such as Tracy Chevalier, Michael Cunningham, Alice Sebold and Scott Turow, along with the book club selections from the Today show, Good Morning America, and Live's Reading with Ripa, among others. The Book Clubs center features a special collection of titles that have printable reading group discussion guides. These guides contain publisher-supplied content that can lead to better understanding of the text and can help get reading group discussions started.