Condé Nast magazines like Wired, Details, Epicurious, Glamour, Allure, Golf Digest etc. will be “delivered” to people’s personal HP web printers so that they can presumably read them without having to go to the magazine stand. This is real! You schedule when you want to read the mags and your HP printer starts spitting out the pages.

(via gizmodo after a conversation with Dave)

“Our work with Condé Nast creates a new channel for customers to access the content they want from some of their favorite publications,” said Stephen Nigro, senior vice president, Inkjet and Web Solutions, Imaging and Printing Group, HP. “And, when coupled with our scheduled delivery service, allows customers to get the content they want, whenever they want it.”

With scheduled delivery to HP web-connected printers using HP print tools, publishers can reach readers more frequently than with print magazines and more tangibly than via email.

via HP's press release which goes on to say
HP Instant Ink delivers Original HP Ink cartridges to the home or office when needed. Users may receive up to 50 percent annual savings on ink cartridge purchases for one low monthly fee. Subscriptions for HP Instant Ink will be available from $5.99 to $10.99 per month depending on the product line, plus all cartridge shipping is included.

This seems to me to be a backwards step - print out magazine content on (probably) sub-standard paper, with (probably) sub-standard ink and bind it together in a (probably) sub-standard binding although on a schedule that I (notionally) choose, with content I (notionally) choose *. A lot of this seems to all be about selling ink, something that seems to be backed up by this HP Instant Ink subscription package.

* - I haven't yet tracked down pricing models from Condé Nast for getting the content, or how configurable that magazine schedule will be.

I'm not sure that the magazine market has really worked out what it's doing yet. A lot of the digital magazines seem to just be about repurposing their print edition rather than offering me something different, something more suited to the availability of the information or the medium on which I'm consuming. I want the editorial quality of a monthly/weekly publication, but with timely extras - a breaking news section which refreshes every time I open my magazine for instance. This shouldn't be difficult to achieve, this is, effectively, what the web sites for such magazines provide (I'm thinking of wired here and how frequently I consume articles from their iphone news app). I'm not sure that home-printing is the solution to this particular itch (is it the solution to any itch?)