The fluid boundaries John mentions are even more fluid when one considers writing and publishing hypertext. As managing editor of Reading Online, I still do all the things I have always done as an editor -- I check spelling, grammar, and punctuation, I check facts, I impose our “house style,” and I suggest ways the author might revise anything that seems to me unclear. But I also do many things that have traditionally been done by designers and typesetters, inserting and adjusting coding to ensure that each article will open, run, and display as it should. And, increasingly, I take on a technical role when something goes wrong with Javascripts or if multimedia files don't download properly.

More interestingly, I often remove specifications so that you can make your own choices. Whereas the reader is stuck with whatever decisions the designers of a print journal make (if you dislike blue and would rather that the accent color in The Reading Teacher were green, you're out of luck -- at least for the 1999-2000 volume year), if you don't like the font that appears in Reading Online, you can in almost all cases change it by adjusting the browser settings on your own computer.

So, on a very obvious level, this medium blurs the traditional roles of author, publisher, editor, designer, typesetter, and reader. If John had decided to submit this article to, say, The Reading Teacher, he could simply have done what authors have done for decades: typed up the linear version and put it in an envelope to the editors. Had it been accepted, we would have done the rest, and you would have received in the mail a final, printed, static version bound up with other articles and columns the editors decided to group together. But when he submitted this article to ROL, he had to become an author-designer-typesetter-programmer, and I became an editor-designer-typesetter-programmer-distributor. When you change the way this article displays, you become a reader-designer-typesetter, and when you decide which other articles to read during your visit to this site, you become a reader-editor-designer-typesetter.

What is most exciting, though, is when you and I take the opportunity John offers to join him as authors of his work. In my case, John invited me to write this page and add it to the directory for his article. When you decide on the order in which you read the pages in the “traditional” hypertext or on the steps you take off the path in the path-based version, you are in a very real sense creating the article. After all, in print, although you can skim and skip sections as you please, you are restricted by the linear structure the author has established. Reading Online offers an additional opportunity for readers to become authors: the online discussion forums, where you can publish your own ideas about the issues John raises. Our hope with the forums is that readers will see them as components of the articles themselves -- that in some way, those who post comments to the forums are contributing to the creation of the materials they have read. And what's to say that John might not revise the core article in some way to address comments raised in the forum? Reading Online is not a printed journal, and that means that its content is not static -- any page can be corrected, revised, or updated at any time. If you come back to this page in six months, it just might be different.

We are only beginning to discover the ways in which this medium changes the way we experience text; it has already had a profound influence on the way I do my job. Although the blurring of the traditional roles and divisions is not always comfortable -- and, indeed, there is much doom and gloom in the publishing industry as we try to figure out just what value we add when our functions as designers, producers, and distributors are in large measure removed -- it poses some wonderful philosophical questions, raises exciting practical challenges, and offers the opportunity for a far more collaborative, democratic exchange of ideas and flow of information than has ever been possible before. I hope ROL articles like John's will inspire you to contribute to this exchange.

--Anne Fullerton
Managing Editor, Electronic Publications
International Reading Association

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