The flexibility of this reading process, where at every stage we can choose whether or not to follow the links, means that we do in effect create our own versions of texts. Again, this is something often cited as a revolutionary aspect of hypertext, but the computer has just allowed something that many readers were already doing to become more efficient and speedy. Readers, and especially scholars, have over the centuries referred back and forth from text to text. For example, in the early days of printed books, there was a fashion for rotating reading desks, which gave access to many books, kept open at the appropriate reference, thus allowing critical comparisons and “hyperlinks” to be formed between the texts (Manguel 1996, 1997).

In this way, new texts were created in the scholars mind, which were sometimes transcribed as new works --- this is quite simply how ideas and philosophies develop over the ages. And in the same way, using modern-day hypertext creates in our minds new texts, formulations of ideas and thoughts linked together in a possibly new and unique way. In his 1945 paper on a theoretical hypertext system, Vannevar Bush saw that this technique would become an important aspect of the job of the “knowledge workers” (he called them “trail-blazers”) — those who create links between and pathways through the ever expanding amounts of information (Bush 1945). This is precisely what hubs and portals on the web do.