Spring Design Files Lawsuit against Barnes & Noble: Nook Violates Alex Intellectual Property

CUPERTINO, Calif.--(Business Wire)--
Spring Design today filed a lawsuit to protect its Alex e-book intellectual
property. The lawsuit asserts Barnes & Noble misappropriated trade secrets and
violated the parties` non-disclosure agreement when it copied Alex` features
into its recently announced Nook e-book.

"Spring Design unfortunately had to take the appropriate action to protect its
intellectual property rights," said Spring Design Vice President of Sales and
Marketing, Eric Kmiec. "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."

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.

Alex, with its unique Duet Navigator, provides the capability for interaction
and navigation techniques of the two screens and furthermore utilizes the
capabilities of Android to enhance the reader`s experience by supporting
interactive access to the Internet for references and links. As the first in the
market to offer an e-book with full Internet browsing while reading and with
easy navigational control via its touch screen, Alex is well-positioned to offer
the most dynamic and powerful reading device in the market.

Spring Design is focused at working strategically with book store partners to
jointly develop the market and revolutionize e-book with interactive multi-media
open Internet access. "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," said Eric
Kmiec.

About Spring Design:

Spring Design, founded in 2006, delivers innovative e-reader solutions and
products to the e-book market, offering overall "Link Notes", a content
authoring and multi-media publishing tool as add on editions to original text.
Spring Design is located in Cupertino, California with engineering offices in
Taiwan and China. Spring Design pioneered its patent-pending dual screen design
with Duet Navigator capability in 2006, and has been working with major book
stores, newspapers and publishers over the last two years, sharing the vision
and the capabilities of the dual screen device. Spring Design's innovative
patented technologies incorporate the seamless interaction of dual display and
multi-online access in a single device, benefiting and leveraging the technology
and resources of the Web to enhance the reading experience with open Internet
access.

Spring Design
Eric Kmiec, 916-337-4528 (VP Sales & Marketing)
eric.kmiec@springdesign.com
www.springdesign.com
or
Pat Meier Associates
Pat Meier-Johnson, 415-389-1700 (Public Relations)
patmeier@patmeier.com

Copyright Business Wire 2009