WHypertext.

Etext has many advantages which were much discussed in the mid-90's as Coover, Landow, and others recycled poststructuralist rhetoric about the "death of the book" and the "death of the author" in ways very different from the original intentions of Barthes, Derrida, or their fellow travellers. Their predictions overshot the mark by assuming print use would recede at a rate related to the way networks expanded, but some of the original analysis of etextual advantages remains valid:

1. It's cheaper, so eforms -- ezines, blogs, ereviews -- survive conditions that kill print enterprises. Hence the viability of the mommy-bloggers, povertystricken avante garde poetries, the Baghdad Blogger, the students at Tiannamen Square or the pronunciamientos of Subcommandante Marcos in Chiapas, as well as a few gazillion others that defy cataloging.
2. It's scalable and distributable, which empowers niche producers and audiences. How long would Skin take by snailmail? In 1845? Distinctions between professional and personal writing break down, with resultant democratization of form.
3. It's flexible and plastic. Hey, color, sound and video, all for the same dime?

In 1994, a happy encyclopedia salesperson at my son's elementary school informed me that the Encyclopedia Americana was on sale for 1100 and some dollars. I hoisted my jaw back up, tried to look like a responsible adult concerned with the boy's education, and thought, "Yes, 26 nicely hardbound volumes, glossy pages appropriate for printing clear pictures, Updated every year." Why had I thought any differently?

"Or you can have the CD-ROM for 24.95."

"Um, what's a CD-ROM?"

Accordingly, nonfiction writing has become and should continue to evolve as a primarily electronic experience. This has required adaptations in writing expectations that have yet to be integrated -- did anyone have a freshman rhetoric class that taught writing for Web formats? Yet what do we most often write, read, and publish outside of class? Even by the end of the 20th Century, most text was shared online. Most of us never were sure just how the adjustment got made. In retrospect, it was almost unreasonably easy.

As late as 2001, students railed at me that it was unfair and useless that I required them to use Internet sources in their research projects.

Fiction's still rough, though, isn't it?