I have what might be a "free startup idea". Go ahead, run with it.<p>If you pay a very modest sum (annoying payment system, not smooth as top of the line systems) to join "the friends of the SEP", you can become a human drone emulating Amazon's kindle system where you download PDFs by hand for you to maintain and view by hand on your ebook reader or whatever, and they email you if an article on your watchlist is later updated so you can pull your new updated copy (seriously, not a joke). It is a 1980s to 90s era manual labor workflow.<p>Someone/something should USEFULLY middleman and publish to amazon kindle for SEP. Handle aggregation of small articles into texts (the whole thing? or themes? or by letter?), handle the periodic download and release process, basically the content provider gives them a copyright release and in trade 90% or whatever of amazon revenue goes back to SEP. Can it be automated in bulk so it doesn't have to be done by hand? Probably. Are there sites other than SEP who could expand into this? Probably.<p>See thats how to find a startup idea. I looked at downloading pdfs from SEP, said to myself, "what a manual PITA that needs to be automated away", figured other people and places could benefit by a little automation...<p>This idea would never be a billion dollar unicorn, but the general concept of a "non-technologically obsolete middleman who actually provides real 2010s era value in the book publishing industry" isn't all that far fetched of an idea and would probably run a profit.<p>That could pivot later into "and this is how a REAL 2010s era book publisher works" perhaps including paper products, who knows. Or other forms of digital content. Not having the legacy would seem to be a benefit for a new publisher...