HP publishes (updated)

Digital mags, a new, fierce battleground.
Backer said:
HP will publish and monetize your magazine, but at the moment they insist it be given away free for the iPad: that's almost British in its spirit of compromise.

You can make your own mag, the digital edition is free, the paper version sold for a premium price, necessitated by print-on-demand prices.
I doubt anybody will get rich on this, but it might be fun for some.

Update:
It is looking like the free issues are only available in their (also free) iPad app. But then there are many many of them. An interesting development that the Kindle and the iPad have also become keys to getting a lot of free reading material, which either is not on the web or is just better organized and formatted, and easier to find on the smaller devices.

Of course much of the free material is only bait to lure people to the new platform. But it is going to continue for a while for sure. And then it'll be a bit of a trick to get people to pay for it, if they have gotten used to free, like we did with the web.
I do hope that some kind of professional platform develops on tablets, it'll help to get people to work to create professional-quality material.
They say though that the Wall Street Journal has 1.1M online subscribers, that's not peanuts, especially as they save printing and distribution cost compared to the paper version. So I think it's doable.