Pending Lawsuit Indicates the Coming e-Reader Battles

announced not two weeks ago, and not to be released until around Black Friday, the Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader has already  found itself being attacked as a derivative work, which gives no credit for its feature set.

A story in PC Magazine indicates the challenge to Nook comes from a California based company, that stands ready to fight -

A California-based company filed suit Monday against Barnes and Noble, accusing the retailer of stealing its ideas and using them for the Nook e-reader.

Barnes and Noble copied features found in Spring Design’s Alex e-reader and used them in its Nook e-reader, according to Spring Design. The company is accusing Barnes and Noble of misappropriating trade secrets and violating a non-disclosure agreement.

“We showed the Alex e-book design to Barnes and Noble in good faith with the intention of working together to provide a superior dual screen e-book to the market,” Eric Kmiec, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Spring Design, said in a statement.

Barnes and Noble unveiled its e-book reader, the Nook, on October 21. The device, which will retail for $259, is expected to debut at the end of November. It has a color, touch-sensitive display for navigation, allows for wireless downloads via AT&T’s 3G network or Wi-Fi, and runs a variation of the Android platform.

Spring Design claims that it first started filing patents for its Alex e-book reader in 2006. The device is a dual-screen, Android-based reader. It includes Internet browsing and a touch screen. According to a press release on the Spring Design Web site, it was announced on October 19.

Executives from Spring Design and Barnes and Noble had many meetings throughout 2009 and Barnes and Noble signed a non-disclosure agreement regarding the Alex e-reader, Spring Design said.

“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 Design.

“It is our desire to resolve this matter so that we can move forward together to expand and grow this e-book market with enriched user experience, bringing readers to a new level of reading enjoyment,” Kmiec said.

Barnes and Noble was not immediately available for a comment.

I wonder when we will actually see the first of these Nooks hit the street.

Not that i think we actually need another e-reader platform. What is needed is a platform that is open and free, where the maker protects the device and the content is not DRM’d  to make things difficult for the user.

Isn’t it funny that almost all of these readers are willing to utilize open source  products in the device designs, but unwilling to keep the same open ideas for the data construction and transport?

There are those who say that this would lead to a problem with licensing content, but haven’t we been  through this debate before over music?

I have not heard a single thing from my state’s government, school system, or the Governator about using an e-reader for the secondary school children. I think this is a good idea, but rather than locking in to any DRM’d reader, i think the state of California should  use Atom-powered netbooks, and free and open text models. If the 7th largest economy in the word can’t negotiate something like this, what chance does any single user have? The kids would get extra usage from the netbooks, and the state could likely get a better deal with a large PC manufacturer than any of the current crop of e-reader manufacturers.

§

⌘

⌘