Spring Design Sues Barnes And Noble Over Nook Design

Over the last several years Spring Design claims their executives and various teams of management had met with the team at Barnes and Noble to discuss the creation of an ereader for the company. Now that the Nook is releasing in November Spring Design has filed a lawsuit that claims information used from their meetings in which an NDA was signed were implemented in the Barnes and Noble Nook.

The design in question involves the Spring Design “Alex” the companies own ereader, which, like the Nook, features two electronic ink displays with capacitive LCD touchscreen capabilities and Google Android operating systems. On the other hand the Nook won’t offer internet browsing and the screen is only used for device navigation, while the Spring Design unit is meant to act more like a “tablet PC” with various forms of content.

More info will follow as soon as the court case gets under way, although given the number of devices moving towards these exact types of technologies I don’t expect this one to get very far, even the designs look far from the same.