Barnes & Noble is being sued over claims that its “Nook” electronic reading device illegally used trade secrets from another firm. Spring Design says the Nook uses features from its own “Alex” reader.

Though Spring hasn’t published the full details of the lawsuit, it says the two firms have been working together since the beginning of this year under a non-disclosure agreement. The firm’s comments give the impression the two sides had planned a partnership, presumably with Spring producing a reader for Barnes & Noble to sell.

Spring says the partnership involved:

… 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.

According to Spring, it had patents on the Alex reader as far back as 2006. However, the lawsuit doesn’t appear to be about patent violation as such, but rather about Barnes and Noble allegedly stealing ideas from the meetings which Spring would not have shared if it knew they might be used for a rival device.

In what may turn out to be important timing, the release of the Alex reader was announced on Oct. 19, one day before Barnes and Noble unveiled the Nook.

The press release announcing the lawsuit doesn’t specify exactly which “innovative” features are alleged to have been copied. However, the biggest point of similarity is the twin screen. Both devices have a main, portrait-aligned monochrome screen which houses the text of the book being read.

They each also have a smaller landscape-aligned color screen underneath. However, the Nook uses this for navigating the library of books on the device (similar to the iPod CoverFlow) while the Alex uses it to display multimedia content associated with the book.

Barnes & Noble has not yet issued any comment over the lawsuit.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 11:01 am under Legal, Technology.

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