There is like 15 of these ideas on CH... but no one has done it yet... so if so many people have this idea why not do it?

No doubt! I am with Gods_Light here- this seems like a great idea...and I actually have a similar, but more focused idea like this, too.

Community book authoring must be a very challenging area, as I've not seen any site do this right (write?) ;-) yet...

Good luck!

go for it...

sounds good. gd luck to you

A lot of high quality blog content is available for free, but that doesn't give you the copyright necessary to republish it. I'm not sure, but it sounds like you propose re-using content that's already out there (e.g. your third step where the crowd suggests content rather than authoring it specifically for the book). If that's true, you'd have to coordinate copyright rights with every single author, and most of the best won't want to allow you to republish because they want the traffic on their site, already publish it themselves, etc.

I recall a book about the Columbine massacre that wanted to include content from an extensive thread on the Slashdot forum. I don't know if they ever worked it out, but negotiating copyright assignments from every one of hundreds of contributors ended up being a massive amount of overhead on the project.

of course the content has to be good to begin with there is a lot of crap out there too.

I proposed something like this to some company but involved turning all their forum posts into a CD that was to be resold. I was told to get feedback from the forum members and it didn't go over very well.

A couple weeks later, that same company did exactly what I suggested.

I think you would have to change the terms of the blog and say that anything posted belongs to the blog company.

there was a group doing this that went bust - unfortunately I cant remember their name

What about editors? Even scientific books where an expert writes a whole chapter need one. Such a book will need lots of time of expert editing I think.

Be sure its literati worthy...

how about royalty fee and copy right(s) for the authors?

i dunno w how it does work in an online posting... but its a gargantuan task to sort it by category to wit:

on matters re: existence of GOd
on matters re: Bin Laden
on Matters re: dog care

and other mundane things that can warm the hearts, comfort the souls and even disturbed the dead...

etc etc etc.

What will be the title?

A Tea Break for the Blacksmith?
( A blog collections frm d NET)

I cant wait to see it on the coffee table in the nearest Hotel!

Cheers =)

I agree with Micco: republishing other people's blogs and making money out of it seems like a breach of some sort of copyright, or at least of good manners. People wouldn't stand for it on Flickr. Perhaps you could set up a system of micropayments for each post used in the book - a $ a time, or something - with these costs being passed on to the buyer of the book in a very transparent way.

The pitch could be: find your favourite blog posts, or Flickr photos, or cartoons, or whatever (I think your idea goes way beyond just bog postings); pay the creators a royalty using our proprietary system - like Paypal, or perhaps actually using Paypal; then we'll set and print your book the way you want it and send it onto you, making some money off the printing and handling fees. You get a unique, personalised, hard copy document of the web's finest stuff; the producers of the content get paid, and the most frequently republished ones get paid a lot; and the company makes a profit from facilitating all this happiness.

I think it is a really good idea. But I have a couple of questions: do you know how many people really want to reprint stuff from blogs? And do you have access to typesettig software that would allow people to put together their books themselves?