For a couple of years I've been thinking that e-books created out of collections of Wikipedia articles could actually be a viable business. It's not going to make you rich, but it could provide a comfortable stream of revenue on the side.
I would happily pay a dollar or two to read these on the Kindle/iPad etc. As far as I can tell this is neither against the letter nor the spirit of the GFDL or CC-BY-SA. There are a few value adds here compared to reading Wikipedia directly: 0. the obvious one of figuring out which articles to include 1. ebook reader-specific formatting 2. for study topics, creating a more-or-less linear flow out of a web of articles on a topic 3. quality control -- checking for vandalism, etc.
I really hope someone will create the infrastructure for this: i.e., a web interface much like the one under discussion, but which also formats the books in AZW, ePub, and whatever other formats and lets you automatically push them to all the self-publishing stores. (I envision a revenue sharing arrangement with users who create books.) I will even offer to put together a dozen books for free to sweeten the deal :-)
There's unfortunately already a whole boatload with extremely poor quality control, totally crapping up Google Books and Amazon results, especially for more niche topics. They're generally automatically compiled by a script for tens of thousands of titles, and then printed on demand, attempting to pass themselves off as original books on the subject (no mention of "Wikipedia" anywhere). Two of the more notorious publishers are Icon Group (some examples: http://www.google.com/search?tbs=bks:1&tbo=1&q=%22we...) and Alphascript (example: http://www.amazon.com/dp/6130070446). Sort of a meatspace version of content farming.
(That doesn't mean a non-scammy version isn't still a good idea. But the market for bookifying Wikipedia articles is definitely currently not too upstanding.)
(The numbers I collected haven't gone down - they're at 36k/23k today, and the "books" seem available. Actually, the listed prices now seem higher than I remember back then, e.g. currently 32 GBP for 124 pages worth of Wikipedia articles.)
I'm thinking about topics that would make good study, reference, or entertainment material, like "weight training," "atomic physics," "Bay Area travel," "Paradoxes" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paradoxes) or "50 most interesting Wikipedia articles" (http://copybot.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/the-50-most-interest...). Needless to say, there are thousands of potential good topics.
I would happily pay a dollar or two to read these on the Kindle/iPad etc. As far as I can tell this is neither against the letter nor the spirit of the GFDL or CC-BY-SA. There are a few value adds here compared to reading Wikipedia directly: 0. the obvious one of figuring out which articles to include 1. ebook reader-specific formatting 2. for study topics, creating a more-or-less linear flow out of a web of articles on a topic 3. quality control -- checking for vandalism, etc.
I really hope someone will create the infrastructure for this: i.e., a web interface much like the one under discussion, but which also formats the books in AZW, ePub, and whatever other formats and lets you automatically push them to all the self-publishing stores. (I envision a revenue sharing arrangement with users who create books.) I will even offer to put together a dozen books for free to sweeten the deal :-)