Even within the text format of this book are subtle "hyperlinks" that direct the reader elsewhere and I must order Barthes’ S/Z and perhaps Derrida to fully understand.
I am familiar with the readerly versus writerly concept of Barthes’ "death to authors" theory, in part:
Our literature is characterized by the pitiless divorce which the literary institution maintains between the producer of the text and its user, between its owner and its consumer, between its author and its reader. This reader is thereby plunged into a kind of idleness–he is intransitive; he is, in short, serious; instead of functioning himself, instead of gaining access to the magic of the signifier, to the pleasure of the writing, he is left with no more than the poor freedom either to accept or reject the text; reading is nothing more than a referendum. (Hypertext 3.0, p. 4, S/Z, 4)
How I fought this concept as a writer! For the reader to change my words? Over my dead body!
But the premise is that the reader changes the written word–even static text–by his own perception of what he is reading. Again, he can be allowed further freedom to travel the journey by the opportunity of paths chosen via hyperlinked boxes of either story or backstory or footnote information. This is limitedly possible in books–witness the reference to S/Z brought into Hypertext 3.o. But the medium of digital text and image brings it immediately to the forefront, or, it can be ignored while the reader decides upon a different tactic.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology