After almost a year of collaboration, the French ePresse application has been released on the iPhone and iPad.

ePresse, a digital newsstand, is the product of eight press organizations collaborating to build their own platform. In the announcement last week, the leaders stressed their desire to take advantage of the growing appetite for digital press. In doing this, they hope to create value for quality content on digital mediums.

The publications currently available on the site include five national daily papers (L'Equipe, Le Figaro, Liberation, Le Parisien, Les Echos) and three news magazines (Le Point, Le Nouvel Obs, and L'Express). Le Monde, another national daily paper, is notably absent.

Frédéric Filloux spoke about the project and its unique features. On ePresse, users can read summaries of the articles in all the papers for free. Users also have the possibility to see old editions of the paper and resize the text thanks to the inclusion of an xml layer. The articles can be sent via email without a "restrictive" PDF format, which prevents easy sharing on social media platforms. Each editor sets the price for his daily paper.

Another leader of the project, Xavier Spender of L'Equipe.fr discussed the financial side of the equation. The digital newsstand has signed agreements with Microsoft and Orange to distribute content, and is still in talks with Google. It is working to share money with search engines and be placed higher in algorithms for providing quality news. The partnerships also include agreements to share access to information about the readers, a common complaint of news organizations that use Apple to distribute (which does not share that information, which is valuable for attracting advertisers).

The app is especially useful for readers who live abroad, who have no access to full print editions of the paper. It is also an opportunity for newspapers to get more valuable information about who their readers are and what they read.

At the conference, Havas Media presented a recent study it conducted on newspapers. The study brought up ideas about digital usage. Of the 600 participants, a quarter said they had paid for editorial content online before. Nearly a third said that they would be willing to. Beyond just paying for content, 72% of the newspaper readers surveyed also said they would be interested in free content that was paid for by advertisements. 54% said they would download an app that was funded by advertisements.

The study also revealed that tablets are not generally personal devises. Multiple people in a household use them, which proves to be an interesting opportunity for publishers - some users might be willing to buy multiple publications on a single device. According to the study, people that use tablets are predisposed to consume more.

The app will be available on Android and WebOS by mid-July.

Sources: Presse & Digitalisation: Quels Scénarios pour Demain 1,2,3,4