The joy of electronic publishing is that new ideas can sometimes be turned into real businesses without huge capital investments. Take for instance Exact Editions. I quote from their description of themselves:

Exact Editions was founded in the summer of 2005 by Tim Bruce, Adam Hodgkin and Daryl Rayner. The founders have backgrounds in software, publishing and marketing and they are all veterans of the first wave of web publishing. Their aim with Exact Editions is to build a web service which works for publishers and readers to make magazines as useful, simple and pleasurable as any other web service. The starting point is that a magazine on the web can be exactly as it is on the page. The web page should look like the magazine and it should be there when you search for it. No downloads, no flash, no ‘re-purposing’, no messing around. Just straightforward click and search, point and browse.

The founders are all friends of mine and so I should declare an interest but it seems to me that they are doing everything absolutely right. A straightforward business model, a clean website, effective software functionality, a genuine market - and low overheads to run the business. Do try out some of the specimen issues and see what you think.

If they succeeed (which I think they will) they will have done the magazine industry a huge favour in expanding their readership internationally as well as to their core domestic market. I'm not sure what Americans will make of the Spectator.