By accident today I found a completely untapped niche that has the potential to make a LOT of money. This would be a site for people in a specific professional service. Basically it would be a comprehensive online resource that is searchable and I'd want users to be able to add content as well so it will continue to grow. According to my friend who is in this industry, there are approximately 35,000 members of this profession in the US alone. He said he'd be willing to pay between $200-500 a year for access to the content on the site depending on how well it's done. At a 5% conversion rate and ignoring the tens of thousands in other countries, that's potentially $350k+ a year.

The content would need to be sourced from various resource texts which equal approximately 35k pages of printed material. These resource texts are not available in electronic format.

So, my questions mainly have to do with what is the best way to get the content from the books onto the site and make it unique enough that there are no copyright issues. There are several publishing companies that provide these resource guides and while they all may use a little bit different language, the content is basically the same, so I would only be able to re-write it to a certain extent before it would be useless. It'd be likel trying to re-write a dictionary.

Since the potential on this is big, I want to make sure I do it right and would appreciate any suggestions on how to convert tens of thousands of pages of content from paper to electronic without spending the next 10 years typing and without violating copyrights.

Thanks!

if its that niche and its also that broad, and you're going to be spinning copyrighted material, be sure to protect yourself...with either legal rep or very very black hat methods... offshore hosting/bank accts etc.

Thanks, it's actually a very specific and narrow niche, it just has a LOT of information. In talking more to my friend, it seems that spinning is not an option. The users will want to know where the information came from along with appropriate citations. So basically what it comes down to is that it seems I will have to purchase the electronic distribution rights for this resource guide and go 100% white hat. Which I'm fine with...depending on cost.

Has anyone ever purchased licensing fees for a book before?

Why not just become an affiliate of Amazon or a book merchant where they are sold and Write review articles on your own and then promote those books. Maybe build a list and email links to the latest reviews on those types of books.

Just an idea.

Because, the problem is that none of the books in this field are available electronically and that's what they want. There are only about 5 books and the targets will own them anyway, I just want to provide an electronic, searchable, easy to access format for reference.

ya i agree set up all in this in a country were you would have less hassle.

This is a hard way and I guess that you don't want to waste so much time but you can always buy the books and have them completely rewritten...

You need to narrow the base and do a regression data set empirical analysis after you prime the data, etc.

Get a goog sub-niche going.

Thousands of pages rewritten (spinning it wouldnt work even if you were able to get it online because 300-500 bucks a year people want quality), you better do a small test of the market before committing because this will take up a lot of time!