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.
all serious intellectual work happens on the page, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. If you want to contribute to the world of ideas, if you want to entertain and manipulate complex thoughts, you have to read and write.