I'm building a tool that connects books, papers and films into learning paths – would you use it?

Been building this for a few months, mostly because I couldn't find anything that actually solved my own problem.

The problem: I want to deeply understand a topic — capitalism, samurai culture, existentialism, whatever — and I don't know where to start. I google "best books on X", get 15 listicles, pick one randomly, finish it, and still feel like I'm missing context. I don't know what I should have read before it. I don't know what to read next. I don't know which documentary would make it click visually.

So I started building Cognivium.

The idea is simple: you search a book or topic, and instead of just getting "people also read", you get:

- what background you actually need before reading it

- what to read after, in what order

- academic papers that go deeper into the same ideas

- films and documentaries exploring the same themes

It's not a social app. There's no rating system. No reviews. Just: here's the map, you decide where to go.

Under the hood I've embedded 1M+ books, 390K academic papers and 155K films into vector indexes and cross-linked them semantically. The book about Musashi surfaces Kurosawa films and Weber's rationalization papers — not because someone manually tagged them, but because the ideas are actually close in embedding space.

Honestly not sure if this is something people want or just something I wanted. That's why I'm posting.

If you've ever felt lost trying to deeply learn something through reading — would this have helped you? And is there anything like this already that I'm not aware of?