We did wonder about the timing two weeks ago, when the first eReader with dual screens, one of them colour, appeared 24 hours before another eReader, also with dual screens, one of them colour.
Draw your own conclusions, but Spring Design, which launched the Alex on the eve of Barnes & Noble’s Nook, now says it has filed a lawsuit alleging “Barnes & Noble misappropriated trade secrets and violated the parties’ non-disclosure agreement when it copied Alex’s features into its recently announced Nook e-book.”
Spring Design, based near Apple HQ in Cupertino, says it has been forced to take appropriate action to protect its intellectual property.
“We showed the Alex e-book design to Barnes & Noble in good faith with the intention of working together to provide a superior dual screen e-book to the market,” said Eric Kmiec, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, in a statement.
The company says it first began filing patents on its dual-screen eReader in 2006 and, since the beginning of this year, there had been “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.”
We tried to get Barnes & Noble’s side of the story on this, but a spokeswoman said the company did not comment on litigation.
Both the Nook and Alex run on the Android operating system. The Nook is due to go on sale later this month, while Spring Design says the Alex is expected to appear before the end of the year.
Aside from their legal complications, they are entering an increasingly crowded eReader market where a lot is at stake.
According to Forrester Research, eReaders will be a “breakout success” this holiday season. Its latest projections are for 3m units to be sold this year, with 900,000 units selling during November and December. It expects sales next year to double, bringing cumulative sales to 10m by the end of 2010.
