HP unveiled its MagCloud offering at Web 2.0 Summit this week. It's an impressive service that gives would-be publishers a cost-effective and cost-predictable way to easily publish content, all on-demand. We got a hands-on demonstration.You can watch the video of MagCloud below.

This technology is really built for smaller publishers -- people who have content that they might want to pull together into a quick publication. And for that, it looks very promising.

Publishing with MagCloud is as easy as having a PDF of your content. The interface does most of the work, prompting you for logos and meta data. The "magazine" sits on the web, where you can drive people to go order it, so the meta data can also help people find it.

One of the biggest barriers to print publishing is the cost. To be cost effective, you've got to print in volume. But MagCloud takes much of this guesswork away, showing you the cost per page (20 cents), letting you enter a price for a subscription (it shows you your cost per issue) and ordering copies.

Of course, all of this assumes that there is still an appetite for more niche print publications. HP showed me some very slick offerings, so perhaps there is still a market. Either way, what's most impressive here is the ability of the cloud to completely change the economics of an industry.

Fritz Nelson is an Executive Editor at InformationWeek and the Executive Producer of TechWebTV. Fritz writes about startups and established companies alike, but likes to exploit multiple forms of media into his writing.

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