log shipping to multiple-read servers The SQL Server 2008 R2 Web Edition product marketing site has a benefit listed on its High Availability section: 


  Benefit from log shipping, which helps automatically back up data on separate servers or keep multiple-read servers online to better handle large amounts of web traffic... through one-way merge and transactional replication.


How is this scenario implemented? Is this referring to:


log shipping to multiple target instances and using snapshots and lots of T-SQL to keep them in sync
new functionality to manage multiple-read servers? 
other?
Log Shipping is a high availability feature of SQL Server where a database copy from a specific point in time is made available to a different server using full backups + scheduled transaction log backups delivered by an internal mechanism of SQL Server.
It's composed of some SQL jobs and some executables and is accessible by a wizard - right click a database -> Properties -> Transaction Log Shipping.

It's no new functionality of SQL Server (if I recall correctly it's at least from SQL 2000).

You can read about it here: Log Shipping Overview.