Robert Coover published an article in the New York Times; The End
of Books, where he expresses his concern about Hypertext technology
killing books. First he defines hypertext and the functions of it, to give the
conclusion that hypertext is a hardware and software that is short living and fragile.
Coover knows that the change is inevitable but questions its function
abilities.

A fellow classmate, Dario Dominguez feels
that all Interactive Fiction allows the player to take different routes to the
plot, but essentially the player reaches the same conclusion, regardless of the
navigational sequence.

This is the link to his work:   http://scalar.usc.edu/works/interactivity/escape-from-freedom

Even though Coover’s arguments and Dominguez’s
arguments do have grounds, the evidence shows that Digital Pieces of Literature
do allow readers to be co-authors. Take blogs, for example, some are interactive
and require the reader to navigate through hypertext to obtain the whole story.
The reader is also able to leave comments that will be viewed by other readers,
and the next spectator will include the previous readers comment in his
experience and plot analysis. Hypertext and interactive fiction is interpreted
differently by every single reader, and does not have a single meaning behind
it. Some novels in print for example have clear messages that they want to get across
and the reader cannot deny them. With hypertext, there could be several stories
intertwined, like in Disappearing Rain, and
thus each reader takes a different experience from it.

1. Conclusion
2. Introduction
3. What is Digital Literature?
4. The reader turns into a collaborating author
5. Interactive Fiction (IF)
6. Non-Linear story telling (Hypertext)
7. Landow & Hypertext