While not directly about e-books, the news that Leap Wireless and Sprint Nextel are going to offer the iPhone for prepaid cell phone service—the first US carriers to do so—could have be important to e-book readers.

Before the Kindle came about, the iPhone and iPod Touch filled the gap left by the death of the Palm as a handy pocket-sized e-book reader. But up to this point, the only way to get an iPhone was to sign up for a costly AT&T service plan—something outside the reach of people who don’t talk on the phone enough to make a monthly-fee plan worth the money. So we’ve made do with the iPod Touch, with a separate cell for talking on the phone.

In the deal from Leap’s Cricket service available June 22, the iPhone gets a price break from the unlocked version sold by Apple (though is still a few hundred dollars more expensive than the contract-backed versions) but Leap’s unlimited plan is $55 per month. (The exact details of Sprint’s pay-as-you-go iPhone plans aren’t available yet.) That’s less per month and a lot more flexible than the plans that carriers with two-year contract lock-ins offer.

This will bring the iPhone into the range of at least some people who have been excluded up to now due to disinclination to shell out that much for a phone plan—not to mention being locked into a contract for two years. And at least some of those people will find that iPhones are a very nice way to read e-books and other Internet content.

Of course, this is an area where the US lags behind other parts of the world; I’m given to understand pay-as-you-go iPhone plans have been available in Europe for quite some time.

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