I'm working on an application which contents are taken from books and I can find similar content on competitor site. As I'm not copying their content but the content from books I have this fear that it could be marked as duplicated content. How can I resolve this issue or avoid duplication?
You're correct. Without proper care, your site could get dinged for having duplicate content. There are several options that you can take:
1)If you want the page to be indexed, then putting the book content into an iFrame (which search engine spiders can't crawl) is a good solution. Include some original content as an introduction to the page and then place the "duplicate content" into an iframe. This will allow the page to get indexed in the search engine results without putting you at risk. I recommend having at least 500 words of unique content per page:
2)The other option - if you don't want to write introductory text - is to tell Google not to index those pages. Add a noindex,follow tag to pages that have duplicate content.
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">