On-Line Chess Book Liberary

In my real life, I am a complete Techno- Geek. I build and maintain software and websites for major companies to solve complicated bussiness needs.

I have stumbled upon an idea and was wondering if anyone has ran across it or if anyone would use it.

I was thinking with the high price of chess books, what if there was a "Chess Liberary" website. A place you could go, look up books on various topics or aurthers and read them. Of course you couldn't down load them - that gets into copyright violations.

But you could read them - perhaps open your chessbase or other software and play along as you study - 

Idea just poped into my head 10 minutes ago so specifics are not generated, but before I waste one more second on the idea I thought I would bounce it off an active chess population.

Any thoughts?

Too late. Internet pirates already offer a free liberary service.

Even if you tried to offer a legal site, living authors and publishers could not and would not let you host their content with no way for them to make anything.

Who would spend a year writing a chess book if your liberary would make it freely available to anyone?

I'd say probably a better idea would be to offer books that can be downloaded and loaded onto devices such as the Kindle. There's plenty of material that's in the public domain that could be offered freely, however translations of such works may be subject to copyright, so that might be a bit of a roadblock. Perhaps a better idea would be to charge some kind of subscription fee and offer authors and publishers financial compensation to host those works. Personally I can see subscription based al-la-carte models working for several different types of media. While it's true that almost anything you can think of can be had for free thanks to piracy I still think a vast amount of consumers want to support legitimate distribution models that offer value and convenience.