Illustrated art books?

I just finished answering some questions for the authors of an upcoming book on publishing photographic books. One of the questions asked whether I envisioned Hol ever growing to produce illustrated books, here's what I said:

I'd love to do illustrated books at some point and I think our model could be well-suited to it in with some careful tweaking.

The reason for our current focus on writing on art is both ideological and financial. For the former, we believe that art (like publishing) should fundamentally be open and accessible to all, and that educating and engaging people through reading is a way to support this. For the latter, by avoiding the significant expense of printing large, highly-illustrated books we limit our financial risk on any given title and can therefore take more intellectual risk. So, when our community of users votes to publish a particular project, no matter what we think of it or its commercial potential, we can do it.

Were we to do illustrated books, we'd have to keep this mission and this financial freedom in mind. I think a great first place for us would be artist books. Whether xerox copied zines or lushly produced photo books, artist books would extend our mission by giving our readers direct interaction with works of art. (As opposed to an exhibition catalogue or monograph where a readers are only getting interaction with art's reproductions.) And because of the personal nature of these kinds of projects and artists' direct involvement in them, they would allow for some terrific networking opportunities for team members. I could also foresee an opportunity to extend our collaborative model to include a collaborative method of funding as well—Funding as investment, or philanthropy, or both, that would help support the increased cost of production. There are some standalone efforts at this kind of microfinance already in play in other sectors, and just as user generated content and social networking informed our book development model, these new, loose, individualized financial networks could inform a future book production model for us as well.