This is similar to an idea I was thinking about a couple months ago - a marketplace for microbooks (similar to how apps are super-specific programs, microbooks would be super-specific topics for books).

Here's a write-up of my idea: using analytics (maybe even adding Google Analytics API integration) to make microbooks from blogs and setting up a marketplace for them.

Having the book periodically update itself would be a neat twist.

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There are millions of bloggers around the world, each with their own niche - be it bento cooking, or hiking in remote regions, or celebrity clothing. Blogs are organized for time -- the latest and greatest, the newest, not really for exploration or diving deeply into a topic.

Maybe you're planning a trip to New Zealand, and you'd love to buy "10 Lord of the Rings Hikes in the South Island" or "Foods only New Zealanders Eat" -- the type of content that you find online in blogs of people who are passionate about these topics, but that are difficult to find at your local bookstore.

Wouldn't it be great if you could find a library of these topics that are only found in blogs, already organized for your buying pleasure? It's similar to Apple's app store, where instead of having a huge piece of software that does multiple things (e.g., a scientific calculator is like a whole book of travel on New Zealand), you buy a small, targeted app (e.g. a tip calculator).

The service would work like this:

1. Bloggers would input their blog url
2. The service would automatically analyze the content, looking for engagement (most comments), content, trackbacks. It would look deeply for similar topics (e.g., types of bento, countries, clothing styles) or broadly for a "variety pack". (It would be great to integrate this with analytics for page views and visits, or user paths through a site). A simple first start to bypass some of the algorithmic complexities might even be to offer "The Best of 101Cookbooks", that looks for the most popular posts in a blog.
3. The blogger chooses a template for the microbook, reviews the proposed books (and probably writes the title, as it seems difficult to automatically generate an interesting title), and that's it! They're given a small widget which they can incorporate into their own blog that will lead to the microbook store. (It'd be fun to generate template colors or even templates from the blog itself...)
4. The service posts the approved microbook in the store (and cross-posts the listing in the Amazon store, or the iBook store).

The idea is basically a self-publishing platform for ebooks, but basing it off of blogs would be a way to fill up the empty playground. Competitors might include Lulu, a self-publishing company, and perhaps Amazon (although there would be a synergy with Amazon selling these shorter ebooks). However, there would be the IP advantage of the technology to analyze blogs and create grouped topics for book suggestions. I see this as similar to the Apple App store, where microbooks would sell for low prices (most 99c) and the service would take a cut of sales as the business model (the ebook creation would be free, although premium features could be added).

The biggest problem would be DRM - after the book creation, there's very little that would stop a blogger from selling it separately on their own site. An argument against this would be traffic from the marketplace and the activation energy required to actually set up a payment system on the blog, although just providing a widget would help with that.

"Why would I pay for it, when I can read the blog for free?" Sure, one can browse the blog, but you're limited to either looking chronologically through every post, or hoping that "related posts" will take you to the right place. This service would organize the content for you, in an elegant, awe-inspiring, pixel-perfect design.