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.
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.
an interview about instant messenger that takes place on instant messenger. the lesson is simple: writing is hard because it forces us to improve our thinking.