I may have spent years suggesting that the print industry will decline in the face of digital abundance, but I’ve also long-suggested that niche print publishing is the logical future of dead trees.

Which is why Hacker Monthly is so cool.

Essentially it’s a curated selection of the top links voted to the top of Hacker News – which itself has long been a favourite user-voted site of mine. Leaning towards coders and programmers, Hacker News submissions can be “anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity.”, and the organic growth of the site means that it sticks pretty closely to that, rather than slipping into trivial shock links (as happened to Digg a lot over the years).

Originally started as a side project, Hacker Monthly has become a 3,000-paid subscriber production, available in print, or as a digital download. And the promotion of it largely comes from hardcore digital people making a rare move in buying something in a print format…

Lower East Side Print Shop by cherrypatter on Flickr (CC Licence)

The reason it works is that it’s a mix of crowd suggestion and editorial curation which has a big digital audience to convert a certain percentage into a payment model.

Or just because it’s cool.

(h/t ReadWriteWeb.)