In a wide-ranging discussion of where e-books are going — one that implicitly references (The Atavist) and anticipates a number of cool storytelling projects — Kevin Kelly describes Wikipedia as the paradigm for a new kind of narrative experience:

[D]ense hyperlinking among books would make every book a networked event. Right now the best a book can do is to link to another book’s title. If another work is mentioned in passing or in its bibliography, an ebook can actively link to the whole book. Much better would be a link to a specific passage in another work, a technical feat not possible yet. But when we can link deeply into documents at the resolution of a sentence, and have those links go two ways, we’ll have networked books.
You can get a sense of what this might be like by visiting Wikipedia. Think of Wikipedia as one very large book — a single encyclopedia — which of course it is. Most of its 27 million pages are crammed with words underlined in blue, indicating those words are hyperlinked to concepts elsewhere in the encyclopedia. Wikipedia is the first networked book. In the goodness of time as all books become fully digital, every one of them will accumulate the equivalent of blue underlined passages as each literary reference is networked within that book and all other books. This deep rich hyperlinking will weave all networked books into one large meta-book, the universal library. Over the next century, scholars and fans, aided by computational algorithms, will knit together the books of the world into a single networked literature. A reader will be able to generate a social graph of an idea, or a timeline of a concept, or a networked map of influence for any notion in the library. We’ll come to understand that no work, no idea, stands alone, but that all good, true and beautiful things are networks, ecosystems of intertwingled parts, related entities and similar works.

As Kelly goes on to argue, there will still be a place for self-contained narrative experiences. But we’ll have a clearer sense of how each one of them fits in a larger intellectual ecology. And to think that this (kind of) started with the invention of the footnote.