The physical presence of collaboration was paralleled by the physical absence of the book and its history of reading habits. As Jay Bolter points out in Writing Space, instructors try to teach students to discover the associative organizations and relationships that lie beneath the order of pages and chapters, to understand how multiple meanings are constructed rather than to pin down an absolute, unitary meaning. (22) But, according to Johndan Johnson-Eilola, in Nostalgic Angels: Rearticulating Hypertext Writing, "The physical, stable presence of the text works to deny the intangible, psychological text the reader attempts to construct." (145) [or which we as instructors try to teach our students to construct?]

Hypertext robbed the students of the reading preconceptions enshrined in the physical shape of the book. They quickly discovered that piecing together 'the story' was a lost cause. Even a quick straw poll of readers around them in the computer classroom revealed a multitude of contradictory stories flowering from a single disc. Even so basic an element of 'the story' as an ending had vanished, not just in the text, but also in the physical object which contained it.