Electronic texts often have no definitive edition:

1. Different Layouts: Unlike the printed page, where each book within a printing is identical to every other one, each web browser on each computer renders the text is a slightly different manner. Some of this comes from the limitations of different computers, but others often come from user preference settings. There is simply no print parallel to the user's ability to change the text layout to fit personal whims.
   
   
2. Evolving Content: Electronic texts are often unfinished documents that continue to be edited and expanded with virtually no advance warning given to the community of readers. It is notoriously difficult to identify the formal edition of most web pages.

Even when the authors have stopped modifying the text, the ability of each reader to experience the hypertext in a unique manner simply by selecting a different series of links calls into question our notions of a single definitive edition for electronic manuscripts.

Electronic texts often do not have clear boundaries. This text includes several links to outside resources, each of which may also point to still more resources. This can create ambiguities over when one text ends and the next one begins. For example, if you were do "bind" this text by copying all of the pages onto a CD-ROM, should you include the external links?

While electronic texts have amplified the instability of text, this phenomenon also exists in traditional texts although our culture typically strives to minimize its visibility. Consider, for example, the many versions of dramas or music. Recently, Ted Nelson has dubbed these as "parallel texts".

Without fixity, one cannot have a unitary text.