Anyone in e-books should be rooting for the success of a trial of the iLiad tablet for newspaper reading—with Le Monde and four other major French newspapers involved.

Get people reading E for any purpose and they may well move on to e-books.

Newspaper/pub domain synergies?

In fact, the French experiment includes not just newspapers and city guides but also novels from Feedbooks, Médiatoon and Mango. Feedbooks is a favorite of ours because of its support of the ePub standard (disclosure: Feedbooks co-founder Hadrien Gardeur is a TeleBlog contributor).

The French experiment is a great example for any U.S. newspaper publishers who might try out the iLiad on readers. Just as e-newspapers are good for e-books, the reverse works. Getting public domain books in the bargain can only make the use of the e-reader more attractive in general.

Cellphone angle

While supportive of Orange‘s experiments with tablets, I still wonder if the real future won’t be the use of cellphones for e-reading, as rollable E Ink displays improve—check out the Readius. The PaidContent blog, where I saw the above YouTube, seems to be thinking similar thoughts.

That said, I especially like the iLiad because of iRex Technologies’ open approach, such as support of third-party apps—a stark contrast with Amazon’s Kindle.

What’s more, the large screen should be helpful for readers wanting something reasonably close to the traditional newspaper experience. Other papers involved are Le Parisien, Les Echos, L’Equipe and Télérama.

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