Nonlinear reading

Free the written word from the tyranny of linearity!

One interesting consequence of nonlinear reading (using the heatmap prototype I'm building) is that the reward curve for reading becomes much smoother.

With traditional prose writing, you may need to read some substantial portion of a text to get "into the meat" and begin to reap any value from what you're reading, but with nonlinear reading, you start learning and picking up new information immediately, and the closer you read, the more you pick up, in an almost linear correspondence.

This makes me want to read almost everything I come across to at least some level of scrutiny, and makes me at least skim-read texts that I otherwise wouldn't even have clicked on, because even 3-5 seconds of reading can teach me something new or give me good information about whether a closer read is worth my time.