We just finished our home remodeling website. We took the contents of a 356 page home builders catalog from 1927 and converted it to a website. The book has hundreds of renderings of all the parts of high end, custom homes of that time. The craftsman influence of Gustave Stickley is evident. We think people who are renovating old homes will find it helpful to see examples of furniture and furnishings that were popular then.
It also made a good test of our listing code. We were pleased to see that it scaled well and resulted in a good looking site (In our humble opinion). In fact, it went so well we are considering using the same approach to publish the 2,500 page Shapleigh's hardware store catalog of 1935
Right now it has AdSense ads on it, but we may be able to develop some products to sell there too. The book has eleven color plates that would make covers for an attractive set of greeting cards. For someone involved in renovating an old house or who knows someone who is, a box of these cards might make a good gift.
We are considering turning our scans of all the pages into one huge PDF and offering that for sale. It is possible to make PDF's searchable which would help people find what they are looking for.
All that is in the future though; it took five 16 hour days from start to finish. If that seems like a lot, remember I don't just copy the old book. I like to add comments and give each page unique titles, metatags, etc. That slows the process down considerably, but I believe it improves the quality.
