Interesting.
I did something similar this past summer that I called the Wisbit App (wisbit for wisdom-tidbit). The idea behind the project was to collect the most important passages (or wisbits) from books and present them as summaries. Users wanting to save time on reading books simply browse the curated passages and rank them. It was my first ROR app, so it leaves much to be desired, and I've only added my own readings to the collection of books thus far. Anyways, here it is in case anyone of you finds it useful: http://wisbit.akeelali.com/