Brenau University announced today that it has entered into a long-term contract with Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, Inc., to manage the bookstore on the Gainesville campus and provide broader service to the university´s remote campuses and online studies program.

Beginning this spring, Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, headquartered in Basking Ridge, N.J., will operate the existing 400-square-foot bookstore space in the basement of Owens Student Center on the Gainesville campus. In the fall the bookstore will move to Feldman House at 510 Washington St. SE, where Barnes & Noble College Booksellers will continue to handle store operations. In its new location, the bookstore will occupy the 1,200-square-foot main floor with office space and storage on the floor above.

"We needed to do something to improve service to students and faculty, and we did not want to run a bookstore," said Brenau University Executive Vice President and CFO Wayne Dempsey. "So we will bring the premier college bookstore management firm to Gainesville to do it for us."

Barnes & Noble operates more than 600 campus bookstores nationwide, including those at Harvard, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Georgia Tech, Mercer University and six other Georgia institutions. The company addresses textbook needs for about four million students and 400,000 faculty members. Ben S. Dixon, Vice President of Campus Relations at Barnes & Noble College Booksellers said the new partnership "will greatly enhance daily campus life for Brenau students." He added, "We will bring a high level of customer service to the students, faculty and staff of Brenau University fulfilling a part of the university's exciting vision for its future."

The Brenau bookstore primarily provides textbooks and other classroom and course-related materials to students and faculty. Although that remains the central mission, the new operation will also offer a selection of current fiction and nonfiction titles, plus an expanded array of top-quality Brenau- and Golden Tigers-branded merchandise.

"If members of the public want to walk in and buy books or Brenau polo shirts, they will be able to do it," said Scott Briell, senior vice president for enrollment and student services at Brenau. "But this store primarily is for the benefit of students and faculty."

In addition to the walk-in store operations, Barnes & Noble College Booksellers employs extensive interactive online and logistics capabilities for ordering and managing inventories and quickly acquiring needed items. Briell said this will be a tremendous benefit to all students in Gainesville, on campuses in Augusta and Kings Bay, Ga., and those scattered around the globe taking online courses. A chief complaint directed at many college bookstores has been that booksellers simply do not order enough books, likely because they want to avoid dealing with large inventories or paying shipping costs and restocking fees for sending unsold books back to the publishers. "By the time some students get their books, the course is half over," said Briell. The problem is compounded for online and remote-campus students, who often are at the mercy of what they can find available from Amazon.com or local bookstores.

Briell noted that the new arrangement with Barnes & Noble College Booksellers will also help students and faculty deal with the skyrocketing cost of textbooks. The company owns some operations of MBS Textbook Exchange, which deals exclusively with used textbooks. That tightly integrated relationship, coupled with the liberal buy-back policies of Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, means students can recover a large part of the cost of expensive textbooks that they may use for only one semester, Briell said.

The company also markets services aggressively and supports campus events, such as the scheduled October 13 appearance on the Brenau campus of best-selling novelist Khaled Hosseini, author of "The Kite Runner" and "A Thousand Splendid Suns." On its Web site, the company is currently promoting a book-signing event at Johns Hopkins this month featuring best-selling mystery writer Laura Lippmann, daughter of Madeline Mabry Lippman, a 1953 Brenau graduate.