I see a great blog one time where the author was writing a book in the first post. All following postings were dressed up change logs with many interesting and useful comments.

You don't want the notification factory but if its a single post that gets updated you don't get any feed updates at all. Reading the same book again and again looking for the updated sections is also not much fun. Dropping a comment in the long list of comments under it doesn't really create a discussion. (specially not without feed updates)

You could design the publishing tools so that it "forces" the user into that pattern. People could work on multiple books or long reads but start with a crappy draft or just a bunch of links.