The Medium of Text

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.

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.