It’s tough to compete with free content, as Richard Branson’s Virgin Group is apparently starting to realize -- their iPad-exclusive Project magazine is now available free of charge through December 29.

AppleInsider is reporting that interactive digital magazine Project is being made available free of charge through December 29. The $2.99 per issue publication, the brainchild of Virgin’s Richard Branson, has always been free to download, but individual issues required payment to proceed any further.

The debut December 2010 issue is now free until next week, featuring a profile on Tron: Legacy and True Grit star Jeff Bridges. Among the numerous interactive features of the digital-only magazine is a page where the Academy Award-winning actor walks onscreen “along the shore of a beach before the text accompanying the first paragraph of the story appears.”

It’s not only the feature stories that are interactive -- so are the advertisements, including one from Lexus that invites users to “touch to explore the world’s most advanced driving simulator.”

What’s missing from Project right now are subscriptions, which have been a thorn in the side of most publishers offering magazines on the iPad. Rumors have been flying fast and furious that Apple plans to change this, perhaps coinciding with a new tablet-only newspaper from News Corp. called The Daily, which is widely expected to arrive on January 17.

Meanwhile, the first issue of Project is free through the Christmas holiday, with a second issue promised for January.

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