If anyone's interested in creating a free collaborative book on Vue, I'll be glad to offer them a free hosting facility and you can use my Hemingway system to create the book.

You can check out a few of the tutorials I've written for Vue using Hemingway. For instance, you can view the "Tire Modelling Tutorial" at:

http://www.altuit.com/webs/altuit2/vuelab/MakingaTire-PartITextModel.htm

At the top of that tutorial, is a PDF which was generated directly from the tutorial itself. So, Hemingway renders both web pages and PDF's using the exact same content. The PDF's have the option to use a higher rez version of images, and has a TOC along with some other customizable settings.

Hemingway runs on both Macs and PC's, but the PDF rendering part (used when the website version is done) only runs on PC's. There's also a web version of it.

You can see another Hemingway rendered e-book which in fact describes the process at:
http://www.altuit.com/webs/altuit2/MulitiPublishing/default.htm

So, the idea would be to have each user have a different account, which they could then build 'Chapters' then we could collect them and distribute them as a single PDF. Usine a Print On Demand publisher, like CAFE PRESS or other, one could easily purchase fully printed and bound books.

Just an idea.

-Chipp