Many moons ago I tried out a service [0] that did this with pocket articles (although I used to send to pocket vis RSS). It was pretty good! It didn't last long though.

I suspect maybe it's easier now to nail the layout if ai can read content before it goes to print.

[0] https://www.bfoliver.com/2014/paperlater

Thanks for the heads up about paperlater!

AI is indeed a crucial part in solving the two most difficult challenges -- typesetting and curation, although we'll probably do things that don't scale for a little while before fully automating.

I sort of love this, but immediately wonder about curation.

My feeds are pretty unpredictable - sometimes I have 40 new articles in a day, sometimes just a few. The cheapness of digital consumption and interface makes it viable for me to skim titles and read, defer, or dismiss at my judgement. I don't want the entire feed printed out - not viable.

But if some SaaS is curating my feeds for me, I fear it'll turn into another algorithmized something optimizing for what exactly? At least the first-pass filter is explicitly set by me - feeds I subscribe to.

Curious to hear your thoughts on it, and wishing you luck.

Yeah- I get about 300 new items each day in my feed... of which on average about 1% of those are worth reading the full article. There is a lot of duplication as well- many sites will cover a new gadget announcement, but only need to read one to get the full scoop. Printing this would be overwhelming- and many of those sites are summaries of "source documents" (papers, release notes, etc) that I want to jump to.

I am sure people use RSS in many different ways though, it just doesn't seem useful to me.

You got it exactly right, curation and typesetting are the most challenging aspects of it. Experimenting with different solutions...

Maybe you first get the summary on your phone and you decide what to be printed?

I've had this same idea! Of course, it remains an idea never taken out of the garage. Are you delivering broadsheet, or formatting a printable file for users to print at home?

I have had this idea pitched to me many times over the years, with requests to build a simple prototype practically forced into my dev queue .. but I always resist it.

The last time someone tried to convince me this was a good idea was just after the iPhone was announced, and before everyone and their monkey had a super computer in their pocket. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so we almost started - but my advice to the punter then was "lets see what the mobile phone industry looks like next year" .. well that put a pin in it.

Nowadays, I'm not so sure I'd be so willing to do this - again, because it requires the user do the printing - but if you were to, say, make this into a vending machine product, which users can walk up to in the street and walk away with a custom 'zine full of their own interests, you might be onto something.

Here in Europe we have a lot of old telephone booths converted into mini neighborhood free libraries. I've often wondered whether it would make sense to put a public printer in those libraries and let people print things .. seems like this would be a revolutionary new product to make, with printable broadsheets based on a custom RSS, an obvious killer app .. assuming someone can be found to maintain the printers.

(Off to find thermal paper for my ClockworkPi, which I always wanted to turn into a custom RSS printer in the toilet...)

Typesetting is a challenge so broadsheet vs tabloid is undetermined, but whatever it will be it will be delivered to the door. The newspaper paper is a crucial part, I believe.

I’ve thought of this (worked in book sales so the espresso printers were around for print on demand books.

Recently I’ve been living in a cottage town and thought of this idea again… rather than be reading on phones or tablets people could read printed books with their favourite articles or blogs. But I think the actual distribution system would be the killer, unless it’s at a big resort the transportation will kill the idea.

That's a damn good of an idea. I'd had uses for my old parents for something that came by snail mail, to notify sports events or what not.

There are already some similar projects that use a thermal printer to achieve this.

This sounds interesting. Do you have anything to show yet?

Not yet, but we'll need beta testers. If you're interested and in a large metro area please reach out to ofek [at] nestful [dot] app mentioning said metro.