This would be a useful service. My first thought was “use something like mechanical turk”. That lead into what I believe is the harder problem which is that in

This would be a useful service. My first thought was “use something like mechanical turk”. That lead into what I believe is the harder problem which is that in order to provide a useful text summary of articles of any topic is that you need to have people who understand the article content. To make a summary service which is useful, we would need to have “summarizers” who can not only understand a myriad of topics but also possess a deeper understanding of the article domain so the summary is a faithful “distillation” of the original. As we all know, this is not easy, unless you have some expertise in that particular field. This sort of reminds me of on demand translating services. In a past life I had the need to use translators for technical and legal documents. There were services that offered translators who specialize in certain areas, such as law or technical software writing, for example.