I read a lot of blogs. Around 200 articles per month get streamed to me via RSS. A lot of those are read and forget but a few are truly great. In fact, they’re so good that certain collections of articles, often times from a single author, rival many of the good books I own in quality. Therin lies the problem.
Books are great for a few reasons. They’re pretty. I can give them to friends easily. They usually form a collection of one authors thoughts. I would like to have an affordable, not super manually intensive way to take a collection of articles or a source, e.g: a substack or blog, and a few days or weeks later get a book shipped to my door. This is something I can do right now but it requires a huge amount of manual faff with formatting, downloading posts, selecting a printer etc…
I would love a website where I can
- put in a link to a substack, blog etc…
- get a UI showing a list of articles by publication date
- select/unselect articles
- get a printed book delivered to my door a bit later with correct formatting, images intact
I can imagine a bookshelf filled with collections of essays from The Diff, Slate Star Codex, Robin Hanson, etc…
Why would this not work:
- how many people actually want this? Is there a market?
- how much does it cost per book? Low volume = high unit price. + the fixed costs of typesetting and making substack posts pretty.
- how does this work with copywright law?
- printing private articles from behind a paywall and then distributing them is illegal I think. Is this also true if you give a customer the ability to put in a URL and then print 1 book only for them. Or maybe some set number like max 5?
- If it is illegal, we could get specific authors to sign up? Does this then turn into basically a publishing house?
Dissent 