Die-hard do-it-yourself interior designers spend hours flipping through glossy magazines, carefully tearing out pages showing a pillow or paint color they like and filing them away for future inspiration. What do they do if their favorite print magazine folds? Michelle Adams, 27, a former market assistant at Domino, and Patrick Cline, 34, a photographer and photo retoucher, were talking about that in May 2009 after Conde Nast closed Domino, its sprightly home magazine. Over dinner at Chili's, they mourned the loss of the magazine and other design magazines, like Blueprint and House & Garden, and joked that they should start their own. 'People were missing all the magazines that had folded, and it was really disappointing that no one came along' with replacements, said Adams, who is also a textile designer. They created Lonny, an online shelter magazine, which put its first issue up in October and immediately caught the attention of design circles as well as advertisers and print publishers. Lonny looks and acts like a print magazine, not a website or a blog. It has pages to turn, a table of contents and full-page ads. But it offers Web-only benefits like zoomable, clickable images, so readers can inspect a lamp displayed in a photograph of someone's living room and then click to buy it. Many readers still like to lounge on the couch and flip through glossy pages with big stylish photos, but as mainstays like Domino and Gourmet disappear, readers are forced to look elsewhere. The websites of magazines like Lucky, Bon Appetit and Architectural Digest, however, are either underdeveloped or visually different from their print counterparts. Lonny's readership is still small -- since October, 600,000 people have read it. But the interest that the low-cost magazine has generated among publishers and advertisers has implications for other image-rich print publications covering fashion, travel and food. This is especially true with the promise of new devices like the iPad that make online reading an experience more like reading in print. On Monday, Lonny, which is based in New York, will announce that it has raised an undisclosed sum from Kristoffer Mack, an investment banker and investor in young Internet companies, and J. Christopher Burch, a venture capitalist and a founder of the fashion label Tory Burch. 'The shelter design industry is incredibly discombobulated,' Mack said. 'There's a ton of money and it's completely unprofitable, so it seemed to be a perfect place to find highly disruptive technologies.' Lonny is published every other month using Issuu, a Web platform where, for $19 a month, anyone can upload a PDF and instantly create an online magazine that looks like a print one. 'A website is continuous and constantly changing, whereas a digital publication has a start and finish, a unique purpose for that one goal,' said Astrid Sandoval, chief commercial officer for Issuu. 'We want to re-create the best of the print reading experience, where people might spend three full focused hours on that, and enhance it with the digital world.' For the first issue, Adams and Cline roped designers and magazine editors they had met in the industry into letting them photograph their homes. They spent $1,000 of their own money and borrowed the car of Adams' parents to drive to shoots. They bartered for free photo-processing and equipment in exchange for ads. Exhausted and assuming that Lonny would never amount to more than a hobby alongside their day jobs, they went to Paris to vacation and photograph. They woke up from a jetlagged nap to find their in-boxes full of messages from advertisers who wanted to buy ads in the second issue. They hired an ad sales representative, without meeting him in person, the same day. Ballard Designs, the home furnishings company, was one of the first advertisers to call. It placed an ad similar to those it placed in print magazines, but offered a 15 percent discount for people who clicked on the ad. 'Typically, we have found that online advertising has not been very effective for us, but the click-throughs and the performance of the ad surprised us in the fact that it did quite well,' said James Pope, director for business development and retail at Ballard. 'Lonny shows you can be online and still be a very designer-oriented, well-designed, graphical piece.' Kate Spade, the handbag and home decor designer; Mitchell Gold, the furniture company; and One Kings Lane, the home decor private sales site, have also advertised in Lonny. With its low-cost operation, Lonny startles people who have worked in the industry. Adams styles and edits, and Cline photographs everything. They hired an assistant who attends shoots, taking her own photos so she can learn the sources for items like sofas or chandeliers and link to them in the magazine. Lonny added how-to videos and search to its site, so readers can search for all the bedrooms it has featured, for instance, and will let people create online scrapbooks, the digital version of the tear sheet collections hidden in design lovers' closets. For one of the issues, they shot the upstate New York country home of Eddie Ross, who now runs a design company and was formerly senior style editor of Martha Stewart Living. A typical shoot for Martha Stewart required seven people and 'meetings about Pantone chip colors and meetings about meetings,' Ross said. 'It was just crazy, because who lives like this, in a $300,000 room I put together? I'm sorry, but I can't relate to a $40,000 mirrored coffee table.' Lonny displays people's own decor, instead of shipping in items to redecorate homes, as many magazines do. In the case of Ross' home, that meant including lamps found in a Goodwill store. The technique infuses the magazine with the accessibility that Domino was known for. 'It's not as stiff,' Cline said. 'We'll leave lamps on and animals walking through shots.' At daylong shoots for print magazines, he used to get four usable photos. At Lonny, he typically gets 27. No one in the industry is saying that Lonny-type magazines will save publishing. But it does provide an avenue toward electronic reading devices like the iPad. Publications often mimic what came before, said Adam L. Penenberg, a journalism professor at New York University. But, he said, 'you'll know a new narrative form has emerged when you have to consume a particular story on an iPad to truly understand its content, and reading it on any other platform simply wouldn't work.' 