The physical form of the book leads to its reification by most hypertext advocates. Here, for example, is a comprehensive statement by Landow: "This technology . . . engenders certain notions of authorial property, authorial uniqueness, and a physically isolated text that hypertext makes untenable" (Landow, p. 31). The book is said to have suppressed anything that "resisted linearization" (Landow, p. 59, quoting Ulmer). But this can be seen as a type/token confusion: a book is only a token of the text within it; its structure, which largely determines how it is read depends on its type (essay vs. poem, for instance). Clearly we need to examine these claims through an account of reading. Meanwhile, the book has become the straw man of hypertext theory: "In a word, we do not believe that there exists, in all rigor, a Platonic text, closed upon itself, complete with its inside and outside" (Landow, p. 80, citing Derrida). No, but whoever did? The book is (amazingly) accused of a baleful effect on humanities research: "book technology and the attitudes it supports are the institutions most responsible for maintaining exaggerated notions of authorial individuality, uniqueness, and ownership that often drastically falsify the conception of original contributions in the humanities and convey distorted pictures of research" (Landow, p. 108).

Moreover, the book is mute: you cannot have a discussion with it. Landow appeals to Ong on this point: "writing presents utterance and thought as uninvolved with all else, somehow self-contained, complete" (cited, Landow, p. 82). Ong here echoes the Plato's premise in the Phaedrus. Hypertext, of course, is supposed to rectify this.