The first Nook e-reader hasn’t even shipped from Barnes & Noble yet, and already there is a lawsuit in the books over it.
Back on Oct. 19th we received a press release from a company we had never heard of named Spring Design. The release was about an e-reader they were developing named Alex which looked quite interesting. We wrote up the story, but found it a tad odd that the company couldn’t give us anything close to a firm release date or suggested retail price even after we contacted them with follow-up questions. To be honest, I have been a writer long enough, and read enough press releases to choke a horse, that I could tell something felt a bit rushed about the whole thing.
On Oct. 20th it became rather obvious to me why it felt rushed when I saw the first pictures of the Barnes & Noble Nook: both devices shared an e-ink display at the top and a color display at the bottom. My first reaction upon seeing the Nook was, “start the countdown clock to one of these companies suing the other.”
Well, sure enough, very late last night I received another press release from Spring Design announcing its lawsuit against Barnes & Noble for violating their intellectual property.
In the new release, Spring Design claims that they have been working on the Alex since 2006, and at the beginning of 2009 they entered into talks with Barnes & Noble about the device protected under non-disclosure agreements. Here is the most relevant portion of the release:
Spring Design first developed and began filing patents on its Alex e-book, an innovative dual screen, Android-based e-book back in 2006. Since the beginning of 2009 Spring and Barnes & Noble worked within a non-disclosure agreement, including many meetings, emails and conference calls with executives ranging up to the president of Barnes and Noble.com, discussing confidential information regarding the features, functionality and capabilities of Alex. Throughout, Barnes & Noble’s marketing and technical executives extolled Alex’s “innovative” features, never mentioning their use of those features until the public disclosure of the Nook.
What strikes me as odd, yet again from reading thousands of press releases over the years, is that the release is lacking in some pertinent information. There is no mention of which court this was filed with which makes fact checking the case a nightmare, and there is also no mention of the amount of monetary damages that Spring Design is seeking. Perhaps it is just an oversight by a possibly inexperienced PR crew, but they are significant piece of information.
We have posted a picture of both devices side-by-side for you to examine below (not to scale), and you can be the judge … well, that is until this goes to court.
Our totally uneducated conclusion? Yes, the color screen is where the biggest hiccup is, but the Alex is using it deliver media from various Internet sources, while the Nook is using it for an on-board store. There is also a problem that both devices are running on the Android operating system, but seeing as Android is open source and free, it is difficult to make a case there. One other sticking point on the Android front … Android is only 1 year old as of this past week, so it was definitely not running on the Alex prior to the fourth quarter of 2008, what was the Alex running prior to that?
This isn’t going to be an easy case to prove for Spring Design, and I honestly have no opinion on which company is in the right, but it sure is going to be messy and expensive.
