When I first got to know what self-publishing is and how it works, I decided to incorporate that idea in my home country. That would not only help some people to publish their works and ideas, but I believe it would help publishing of academic and educational literature (it's a problem to publish something for professors there because of bureaucracy).

I would start my project as a self-publishing website (which will publish and distribute), but later on (depending on its popularity and demand) I would add social networking feature there (so that writers could communicate with the readers etc.)

Actually, there won't be any straight competitors as there is no self-publishing websites in the Ukraine.

As for similar projects, one of my favorites is www.lulu.com (it's also the most user-friendly to my mind). Some other projects:
http://outskirtspress.com
https://www.createspace.com
http://www.selfpublishing.com

Though at first (while first promoting the ... Read more »