Now, in a reversal of what we know as online business, an extremely successful online magazine, or'zine, will publish its first hard copy in July.

The magazine, ePregnancy, was the brain child of Nancy Price of Walnut Creek and Betsy Gartrell-Judd of Chillicothe, Ohio. They've been producing the monthly'zine, which attracts more than half a million unique users every month, on the Web for the last three years.

Now, they have struck a deal with Majestic Publications of Park City, Utah, to produce nine issues a year for a $9 subscription price. Majestic owns the hard copy version and has licensed the trademark ePregnancy from the two women.

Price and Gartrell-Judd are to be the editors of both the paper version and the online'zine.

Price said the two versions, online and paper, would complement but not repeat each other. She is convinced that people would pay the $9 for a different form of the publication.

"The Web is great for interactivity and archiving, while you can read a magazine at the dinner table or in the bath tub," she said. "Ours is the least expensive of all the major pregnancy magazines. People who are pregnant are obsessed with the subject and try to get their hands on any information they can."

Price should know. She currently has four infants waddling around her house. Gartrell-Judd has three. Both women work from home. The two women, who have never met, have collaborated every day since 1998, when they launched their company, Myria Media, Inc., an umbrella for several 'zines geared toward mothers.

Publisher Tony Golden has no worries about the hard copy's success. Myria Media has had "a presence online for the past four years. They made it through the dot-com shakeup and came out on the other side still breathing. That's an accomplishment in and of itself," he said.

Furthermore, the amount of traffic Myria has received online shows that readers already trust the ePregnancy brand, and the site has stoked the interest of potential advertisers, he said.

There are few magazines geared toward pregnancy. Fit Pregnancy is bimonthly and Pregnancy Magazine is monthly (they have their own Web sites, too), and the others are either quarterly or biannual, according to Golden. It doesn't make sense to look for information about one's pregnancy from a publication that comes out once a year, he said.

"The (competitors') scope is a lower demographic; they're going after a median income of $35,000. We're going after a higher demographic," the Utah-based publisher said.

Why are there so few publications geared toward mothers-to-be? Golden surmised it is because pregnancy rates have been down for many years.

"This is the first time in a decade there have been enough births to replenish the people dying," he said.

Price said the ePregnancy Web site, which they created from scratch, has been successful because she and her partner listen to their audience.

"We really know our audience. We are our audience," said Price.