I look forward to see a short-example of it. Even if depends on me scrambling the parts in a static ajax’ed page.

I think something you could develop as a product ( “create a dependency for free, and then sell the solution” ) could be the statistics to understand the recorded data of the exact sequence every person have read the story, so you can provide the author with “best seller” versions of their own story!
That’d be an extra marketing and SEO project, but one that will pay itself.

At a first glance, I see there there are reasons people keeps reading a novel won’t be here.
For example, in order to have all parts live at any moment, each of the smaller parts (chapters?, paragraphs?) should contains the whole format, as TV series: all the characters should appear, all the same gags making up the personality of each character, or you couldn’t grab who’s the selfish or the greedy in each part without knowing the other parts.
Also, the brain has limitations. The mind couldn’t keep the whole story “live” regardless of the way you present it. Forgetting and forgiving are techniques our mind use to keep going without getting stressed (forget my lack of vocabulary on physiologic subjects)
The reason why we get carried away by writer’s waves, forgiving the “bad guy” on episode 3 to feel stupid on episode 9 when he stops playing a good boy to go back to its instinctive evilness, is because that need to look forward and free-up some memory for the next events.

Although, everything has a solution and there’s no way to evaluate the results if you don’t do it. In any case, it will be the needed step for new media to be born.

The system with the notecards works well. My mother was an astrologer, a serious one, and she used to analyze a person’s chart with notes in cards, because that’s kind of how the relations between planets and your life is: It’s not a string that pulls you inevitably to do something but a lot of clues you can sort like words in a sentence. The magic of the process is that a good astrologer puts the words in such an order that matches what will happen (and happened at any time of your life) and the bad astrologer just quotes the good one and makes up what he can’t hehe.
It’s difficult to explain people what real astrology is, but basically it’s just statistics. It’s not 12 kind of people as a magazine wants you to believe, but 12 signs x 10 planets x 10 houses powered to 10 because the planets could be related to the other 9 in 3 different angle constrains.

Anyway, right there you have a story, and regardless of how you (magically) put the pieces together, all of them form a person’s (chances of) destiny.

Let us know when there’s something we can taste!

When I look at the sequence of the books of the Bible, they are not chronological, but the relationship between them is critical.

So, I think your offering an “option” of going back to understand “why” can be great. If you make it an option, then the reader gets to dig as deep as they want. If they want to scan over the book for now, they can pick it up later and dig for the details — all at no cost to the overall book.

So you’ll always discover that Victor is the monster towards the end of the story, but conversations that enrich the narrative but have no immediate effect on this revelation can happen in different orders throughout the story.

Oh, and I have ideas for how to do this that won’t slow down the writing process too much. I actually write in this style already … but it involves hundreds of note cards and is a bit clunky as a process.

Unfortunately, I have a couple problems with the idea. You mentioned how a story could be slowly unfolded like a painting. The problem with this metaphor is that a painting exists to be viewed in it’s final form rather than as a process. This is the same for a story. Although it’s theoretically possible to simply rearrange elements in a story, the author will lose the power to give certain elements power or nuance, since there’s no way to know that the reader will be able to hearken back to a specific scene or phrase. Imagine reading “Frankenstein” like this. We have the ability to know right up front that Victor is the monster and that the Creature is the real human; everything after that realization is monotonous, because it was originally put there to set up a contrast that’s now front-loaded to us.

In addition to this, and precisely because of it, I can’t help but think that writing such a story – that could be rearranged on the fly with no loss of impact or quality – would be almost impossibly hard to write. Rather than helping to bring good books to readers faster, the author would have to make sure that all possible iterations have impact and meaning, which would take a very, very long time and slow down the already slow writing process to a snail’s pace.

That said, I don’t think that you should give up the idea.

One could argue that comics and movies are essentially the same in that they’re visual media that tell a story, but the experience of reading a comic and watching a movie are completely different. A movie director has speed to his advantage, while the comic writer has slowness. A movie director has movement while a comic writer has the ability to pick out detail in a subtle but clear way that doesn’t translate well to movies. Alan Moore has expounded on this extensively.

So what I think you’re really looking to do is not so much update a current medium as you are trying to create an entirely new art form. Because of that, I have no idea what to suggest to you. But I do wish you luck. It sounds AWESOME.

To me, this will be less about the platform and more about the story. Without the energy required to give a story “soul” something like this will only make any gaps or suspensions or disbelief more apparent.

But, if the story is well-crafted then it’s certainly worth supporting. What would warrant my support on Kickstarter is how well you tell the platform’s story on there. A polished Kickstarter project would help support that you could demop for others how to build art on a platform like that.

(Keep in mind that a platform like this would also be perfect for self-directed learning. On-demand topic changes and supporting info would help to make dull subjects interesting.)

I would support the project (as written) at some level but I’m not really a ‘perk collector’so couldn’t suggest goodies to offer. I’m also a ‘little money to lots of projects’kind of guy.