This allows the reader to have more control, but also undermines the author's ability to set out the proper (and only) way to read a text. The author of a book can (and does) assume that the reader begins at the first page and moves sequentially through the text to the final page. The writer of a hypertext can make no such assumptions. The readers may have arrived at a certain node from multiple directions. Brent points out some of the implications for the author and for the reader of such a text.
"Key phrases and ideas turn up in a number of nodes. In linear text, the game is to repeat an idea in such a way that it is obvious that you know you are repeating it for a sound rhetorical reason. When you can't be sure whether the reader is encountering an idea for the first time or the seventh, this strategy is denied you. ...I am hoping that readers will traverse some of the more key nodes a number of times, finding more in them each time they come at them from a new direction, rather than saying 'Dammit, I've already read that one'"( Brent, "Further Discussion").
Generally, hypertexts are set up as a network or web of related information. There are nodes (or screens of text) with links between them. In discussing how he organized his hypertext document, Brent says, "The text took shape around several centres of gravity, sites of attraction if you will, that tended to pull certain nodes into closer relationships than others... most of the nodes in each cluster seem to connect across to nodes in other clusters as well"(Brent, "Further Discussion"). In this arrangement, the reader can follow links to nodes that are "clustered" together, or they can follow links to nodes in a different cluster, or if the hypertext is displayed on the World Wide Web, even follow links "out" of the document to related nodes.
Not all hypertexts allow the reader to have free reign. Nancy Kaplan notes that some hypertexts, especially "early examples of hypertextual fiction... [do] place conditions on the accessibility of particular bits of the story. If a reader has accessed a certain set of texts, then the texts in the restricted set become available. If the reader has not, then the restricted set remains closed to her"(Kaplan, "Hypertexts"). In fact, hypertext can be used to impose even more order than a printed book. Hypertext (the method of organizing through links) can create the ultimate linear text-where each section of text can only be accessed from the preceding section or screen. Although the author of book usually intends for it to be read in order, the reader certainly can open up to any page and read out of order if he or she wishes. Despite these uses of hypertext, the main goal of hypertext is to allow methods of organization and presentation of text that go beyond linearity. A text written to be presented as a hypertext normally is organized as a network, rather than as a line, so there is no standard order in which to read the sections. Each reading brings a new text, with new meaning.