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Comment by greggsy | Hacker News Reader

I feel like there’s a market for a publishing service that could partner with popular blogs and websites. They could either allow articles to be selected by the user or the partner site, which could then be auto-paginated and printed being being posted to the subscriber. Hell, sell a service where you will curate articles based on used interests. Add some relevant Twitter threads for letters to the editor.

Partner sites could also benefit from some increased subscriber revenue, and ads could actually be relevant again (remember when Scientific American advertisements were kind of cool and industry related?).

Call the prototype deadtreepress.io or something.

(I recognise the environmental implications, but I think paper and postage can be sustainable in some regions. Maybe you could integrate offsets into the price?)

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Such a service exists. Here are two examples:

https://www.myscreenbreak.com/

https://waldenpond.press/

These look really cool! Might check them out

It’s a fine idea, but ignores the importance of typesetting and design for print.

I’m sure plenty of people would want something like this regardless, but the product would usually look much less polished than people expect to see in printed and bound materials and that would reflect on the authors/editors.

Authors and editors who take pride in the presentation of their work might be a hard sell.

Slightly tongue in cheek, but perhaps you could use ML to automatically typeset it. I've seen some ML that would convert a design to HTML and I'd imagine this isn't too far removed from that.

Sounds like a job for a design & typesetting DALL-E AI.

BTW, Kindle is pretty successful, and pretty much all books use a standard design template, so the great importance of typesetting & design is questionable.

"Pretty successful" is a poor proxy for "satisfies condition X." Kindle is known to be bad for anything where the spatial layout matters.

My other half is an editor and graphic designer and constantly points out bad design. Many CMS platforms do this out if the box to allow cross platform compatibility (at various degrees of success), but you could just define some core defaults to ensure compatibility.

I feel I would want that too even though I got used to reading on screens.

Maybe it could be pdf, I think it may be about some finite amount of content to consume. I guess for me some every 3-12 months ebook with articles that are still relevant and will likely stay relevant for at least a few years would be awesome.

This is a great idea. You could draw in a casual nerdy audience willing to pay a reasonable price for access to high quality OpenAI style explainer pages with access to the raw data and papers.

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