If I decided to really spend some time making this site something unique, here’s what I’d do.
Make the entire site a maximally searchable, sortable, tag-able library of all posts, and a build-your-own book tool.
Anyone could select whatever posts they want, put them in whatever order they want, and it would generate a table of contents and put it into digital or paperback book format. You could choose a cover design or make your own. You could add a personalized introduction, making it easy to gift to anyone.
This would mean you could own or give away a truly one of a kind book. Your curated collection of posts with your own intro, title, and cover.
Now imagine this tool available not just for this website, but everywhere. Any author who publicly blogs or otherwise gives permission could have their content added to a book that you create. As you browse the web and find articles and authors you like, you can add them to your book outline with a plugin like you add articles to read later apps. You could create books around themes of your choice, arrange them into unique collections to make print or eBooks.
Remember mixtapes? Or Spotify playlists? It’s that, but for written content. I have several friends who would be amazing at putting together the perfect collection of works by a certain author or on certain topics that I would read over any publisher chosen book.
With a tool like this, imagine the secondary markets. You’d have authors (with a big increase in possibility of ‘one hit wonders’ and long-tail rare finds), but you’d also have a new form of literary expertise in curators. “Oh, that guy always puts out awesome collections!” The market for cover designers, formatting templates, and custom intros, bibliographies, titles, and appendixes would also emerge.
People do this now with email lists, but imagine upping the game a bit and being able to buy a beautifully bound book collection?
There are stupid copyright implications of course, but you could begin with just bloggers who openly allow such content sharing as long as it’s attributed. You could potentially have some form of royalty payment system if it got big enough.
The main thing is a simple drag and drop tool for turning articles into chapters of a book.
So, if I had the gumption, I’d try to figure it out for my own site first and let readers create books from the 1,400 odd posts here as a pilot of the democratized book curation tool.