The hypertextual medium has been heralded by some to meet Roland Barthes "goal of literary work . . . to make the reader . . . a producer of the text" (qtd in Landow 5). And in many ways, the readers of hypertext do produce meaning, they do structure the text, they do control the amount of reading time they spend with a text. But the mechanical arrangement of the text (which they do perform in hypertext) and the intellectual "meaning making" that they perform are not, as tightly bound, I think, as many hypertext proponents make the case. The selection of where to go next in a hypertextual document is certainly a freedom for the reader, but it is a freedom which must be weighed alongside what is there and how one can get there. No serious discussion of hypertext that I have read has attempted to claim that the reader is completely alone in the building of meaning, and I am far from claiming that authors have the same level of "authority" that they were assumed to have had in those "good old days" or "bad" of Plato and Aristotle. However, the work of the author in a hypertextual document is complicated by the amount "transitional" options the author has--that is, the freedom to place links and freedom in linking strategies and functions. John Slatin discusses the complexity of composing in this medium by focussing on the "predictablility of the text"--and I would add the importance of imagining the possibilities of the text.