Bolter, along with Michael Joyce and John B. Smith, developed the hypertextual writer's tool Storyspace. Shortly after the publication of Writing Space a disk version, prepared with Storyspace was released as well. I had the opportunity to experiment with Storyspace around the same time that I first became exposed to the World Wide Web. It was certainly a powerful tool (as was Apple's Hypercard) and it was capable of much more than HTML was capable of at the time. But the attraction of the World Wide Web stole the limelight whatever other tools were available, and Storyspace, though it has many wonderful capabilities, remains somewhat of an anachronism.
The hypertextual version of Bolter's book was designed to show how electronic
texts work, or perhaps simply to show that they do. Back then it was necessary
to convince. Today, it would seem that few people can really get excited
over that fact. Instead, here I am, coming full circle. Whereas Bolter
moved from text to hypertext, I started out with a hypertextual text which
seems (to me at least) undeniably the proper, perhaps the only, way to
examine the issues I raise here. But I have ended up returning (almost)
to a traditional text, though I'm not exactly sure why I did so, or whether
something was gained by doing so. One thing is sure. Tools like Storyspace
may fall by the wayside. Books never will.