Yeh, something similar except beautiful, not just printing the content. Beautiful cover, font, design, maybe even vintage looking. It might not be "scalable" tho but I think people would dig it and willing to pay $100 for something like that. I would buy a vintage looking book about cars.
Yeah, I'd be interested in well-edited individual books, by someone knowledgeable in the subject who took care with both the physical presentation, and ideally some editing of the content, at least to make the articles flow coherently and not have too much redundancy between chapters (and make sure total crap sections didn't slip in).
In some ways that's the whole point of it being open-content, that you can reuse/repackage it in various ways, but there hasn't been a lot of creative third-party reuse yet.
I think part of the problem is that WP is still mostly incomplete (which is a horrifying thought :D).
By which I mean; if you pick a topic to turn into a book your likely to have articles of a wide range of quality (from featured status, the top, to stub, the bare minimum).
Couple that with potentially disparate styles of writing and it can become difficult to stitch several articles into a book form.
Not that people don't do it; the volunteer email support service regularly gets people complaining about the $50 "text book" they bought of Amazon simply being Wikipedia articles.
It's always been in the back of my mind to try and do something like it though; perhaps an "obscure topics" book with some of the more interesting articles put into it.
They do have a partnership with a print-on-demand company that donates 10% of the revenues, but it just concatenates articles you choose into a book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PediaPress
There is also a user-driven project to organize Wikipedia articles into books, although they currently just use the articles verbatim as chapters, which doesn't address things like redundancy between articles that makes sense when they're articles, but should ideally be removed if they were going to be printed as book chapters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikipedia...
I think it's a great idea. PediaPress is great but (like Wikipedia itself) a little utilitarian.
I have thought it would be a great revenue source for the WMF. Make little books based on certain articles like the List of Common Misconceptions. Sell them as impulse purchases near checkout counters in bookstores. Step 3, profit.
The fundraising team at the WMF isn't really into it, they don't want the hassle of making & distributing physical objects that may not even sell. But it would be a cool project for the right team -- maybe if you want to build your resume as a book designer.
Maybe that will be my weekend project!
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