HN Explorer

Tiny business idea..

4 points by nosse ↗ HN
I just got an idea.

I would really like to get some of the articles on web pages I have bookmaked but newer actually read, as a printed version.

I would be willing to pay for it.

And I'd might like to get a book with a title "best of hacker news in 2009"

You're welcome to steal my idea.

6 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 25.2 ms ] thread
trickjarrett
So the idea is to provide a service where people can submit articles or blog posts or threads and print them in binding?
nosse
Sorry to bother you folks, different web authors licence their stuff with such a variation of licenses that it would be practically impossible to sell customed collections of printed articles.

That is kind of funny, because it wold be quite easy to more than compensate lost revenue from adds.

systemtrigger
> it would be practically impossible to sell custom collections of printed articles.

Well it might not be the safest undertaking and certainly the product could not be sold in corner bookstores but I can imagine such a business in today's world. To be sure, we're talking about an app that lets customers print "protected" works sans owner permission and compensation. Technologically there is precedent for this sort of racket; a lot of very profitable web businesses sell digital content they don't legally own. These startups are cheap to launch and thanks to the wonders of abstraction and obfuscation the thieving operators cloak themselves in relative obscurity. Add a dash of print-on-demand, update the legal contract to ensure absolution if questioned and what you've got is the world's cheapest print store for copyrighted content. It's just Kinko's in the cloud.

I think your idea of shipping documents to customers for free needs more explanation. The cost to deliver analog archives to physical addresses is huge and if you open up the order floodgates do you really think ad revenue would support the print and delivery costs? How would you deal with, for example, all the pranksters? Maybe if you defined extremely tight parameters on customer requests you could make it solvent but I would challenge you to define a single use case. If you can paint that legal, lucrative story maybe you've got an interesting business idea.

unalone
Use an API combined with Lulu? Probably wouldn't be too hard.
sam_in_nyc
When the book "Best of HN 2009" sells, who gets money? The people who wrote the comments? HN? The business that printed the book?
eob
I met an English professor this weekend who was interested in how to best archive one's digital life. He recently went through the last N years of his email, copied the most treasured or important ones, and then had them bound into a book.

It seems like a pretty cool idea.