"Electronic technology removes or abstracts the writer and reader from the text. ...several layers of sophisticated technology must intervene between the writer or reader and the coded text. There are so many levels of deferral that the reader or writer is hard put to identify the text at all: is it on the screen, in the transistor memory, or on the disk?"( Bolter, 42)
It is also much easier to delete electronic text. Touching just one button can make a document disappear permanently. The printed text is much harder to destroy. We must burn or shred a book to destroy its text. Unlike the printed book, which encouraged us to think of the text as an object, the electronic medium separates the text from its manifestations (on the screen). The text is virtual rather than real, so it is more difficult to consider it as a stable entity.