B&N.com Debuts New Multimedia Section and Two Weekly Video Series

By Lynn Andriani -- Publishers Weekly, 3/3/2008 7:20:00 AM

Following a major redesign last fall, Barnes & Noble unveiled a new section of its web site today. Barnes & Noble Studio will collect a range of original content on books, readers and writers and showcase web video series and other multimedia content. B&N.com v-p and head of digital media Mike Skagerlind said, “Barnes & Noble Studio will do for the book what the cooking show did for the recipe.”

The Studio debuts today with two new web video series, Barnes & Noble Tagged! and Book Obsessed. More original productions and content will launch in the coming months, the company announced in a release this morning. Tagged! is a magazine-style weekly web series hosted by actress Molly Pesce (she also hosts Animal Planet’s Backyard Habitat) where, she explains in this week’s 4-minutes-long video, “we search out the best and the juiciest from the world of books.” Among the books Pesce highlights in the first program are Jodi Picoult’s Change of Heart (Simon & Schuster), Linda Fairstein’s Killer Heat (Doubleday) and Jeffrey Archer’s A Prison Diary (St. Martin’s). The other video, Book Obsessed, interviews readers around the country who are passionate about books. This week’s video introduces readers to a woman in Dallas who loves romance novels. The piece mentions the woman’s favorite author (Julie Garwood) as well as some specific titles.

In addition to featuring the two new videos, Barnes & Noble studio will also give visitors to the site another way to access other web content the company has already created and launched, including Upstairs At the Square, Live from B&N, and Barnes & Noble Book Clubs.