ah, that makes good sense for you reasons.
1: hmm yeah, that does make it rather tough, probably not possible to fix unless the encyclopedia was also linked in the same way entirely.
2: lol, yeah, code can be a pain to create, fair enough, and ill read that file in a sec
3: if you make each entry and its page itself hide then it would basically just skip the page and stuff. or you could have mixes of text and art and stuff so that even if it shows pages the actual amount of knowlege and stuff are hidden well behind blur and mystic moving stuff. you could even have it so that the "missing" pages kinda flit in and out of screen in the background with just lots of torn pages gaps in the spine of the book to say "well there is at the least a bit more to find" or something, or even just the flitting pages, to kind of give an idea of "you are not done yet" but it could be closer than they think or farther
p.s. read through the program, what about making the reverse time button trigger a re-locking of the hidden files? just have each chapter have a specific "key" in it that will call the re-lock function for all things in that chapter?