I would do two things:
A) I’d just continue working on my plain-text focussed app for reading/annotation & personal knowledge management – but I’d work on it full time, make it open source, and strive to assemble a team so that there’d be cross-platform versions (web, and native mobile/desktop versions) from the beginning.
B) More interestingly perhaps and thinking a bit bigger, I’d try to build an organization which would strive to transform the academic citation habits (yes, I know, but one can dream…) so that we’d stop citing entire publications but instead:
- cite the actual sentence/statement within that paper/book
- always state the reason why the statement was cited
And this should all be done in a way that’s both human- and machine-readable.
IMO, being able to cite (i.e. link) to the bullet-point level and to specify why we’re actually citing/linking it, all in a parseable manner, will facilitate the next revolution in academics. Of course, other disciplines could also benefit from this.