Books should be structured as expandable trees.
One paragraph summary of each chapter, expandable into summaries of component points/stories, expandable into the full text.
Can read the whole book in 5 minutes or 5 hours.
it’s utterly impossible for an algorithmic video-sharing website like TikTok to be a “town square” in the same sense that Twitter was supposed to be. There are all sorts of McLuhan-esque reasons for this: text as a medium is much faster to read, the reply and quote tweet function is what makes Twitter dialogic, its focus on text makes verbal wit... See more
Reading is alluring. It has a nameless quality beyond satisfying desires for information and pleasure. Despite more colorful and interactive media, reading text somehow remains more refined, more seductive.
What if scholars & fans aided by computational algorithms, could knit together the books of the world into a single networked literature? If a reader could generate a social graph of an idea, or timeline of a concept, or a networked map of influence for anything in the library.