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'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 :-)