You can make the hourglass structure of writing do a lot of work for you. Focus on the
following elements, in more or less the following order:
• Front and back covers, inner jacket flaps
• Table of contents
• Index: scan this to see which are the most important terms
• Bibliography: tells you about the book’s sources and intellectual context
• Preface and/or Introduction and/or Abstract
• Conclusion
• Pictures, graphs, tables, figures: images contain more information than text
• Chapter introductions and conclusions
• Section headings
• Special type or formatting: boldface, italics, numbere