This is nifty, and I feel like this could be pushed a lot further. Epub output is an obvious next step, and I'd imagine a better table of contents view would make the web version more inviting. As for generating money, maybe hotlink products to an Amazon/etc affiliate link so when a user reads the page about "Replacing engine mountings", you can suggest sites that sell engine mountings.
I'm curious about the intermediate "Horrible HTML" stage. Did it retain the book layout at the stage? The scanned book images look much more appealing than the blog-style version (in my opinion). Even though the HTML was horrible, did it still display properly in a modern browser? I wonder if you could write a script to clean up and modernize the HTML while still retaining the nice layout, rather than reformatting into a blog and dumping images to the sidebar.
It would be interesting to see how much the process can be streamlined so you can convert books en masse. I assume there are plenty of books of this style with really good content that would be useful to convert in this manner.
Sadly the HTML rendering was fairly dreadful but it did at least have the images in the correct order. It retained no placement, and each page is very different in layout. My early thought was to have perhaps 4 layouts which I could manually assign each page to. (eg. large central image, 2-large images, etc.)
I'm curious about the intermediate "Horrible HTML" stage. Did it retain the book layout at the stage? The scanned book images look much more appealing than the blog-style version (in my opinion). Even though the HTML was horrible, did it still display properly in a modern browser? I wonder if you could write a script to clean up and modernize the HTML while still retaining the nice layout, rather than reformatting into a blog and dumping images to the sidebar.
It would be interesting to see how much the process can be streamlined so you can convert books en masse. I assume there are plenty of books of this style with really good content that would be useful to convert in this manner.