J. Yellowlees Douglas creates a list of elements unique to interactive narratives in The End of Books - Or Books Without End? Her list, a chapter entitled "What Interactive Narratives Do that Print Narratives Cannot," exemplifies how ingrained the aesthetics of the canon are in many critics' minds. (Keep in mind that Douglas is not really separate from the canon, being one of Eastgate's early successes herself.) Her criteria for "interactive narratives" is problematic to hypertext criticism, however. She sets out to smash the restrictive definitions of early critical works, much as I am attempting right now, but some of her criteria disappointingly reinforce the very definitions she is working against.

Douglas is successful in showing the medium's capacity for being more than just an electronic book, for having qualities that are not reproducible in print. Also, the sentiment behind Douglas's list is exactly what hypertext critics have needed to hear. Ideas of previous definitions have failed to encompass the real potential of hypertext. As she says, "[a]rriving at brief and succinct definitions of an entire medium in a single sentence or even a mere phrase…is more reductive than illuminating, a little like describing a book as 'pages containing text that follows a fixed, linear order'"(38). She rightfully says that "critics, blinded by the small number of early works, have mistaken the hallmarks of a single type or genre of hypertext fiction for the defining characteristics of all present and future works within the medium"(38).

However, Douglas does not succeed in the task she sets for herself. As much as her list of definitions is longer, and presumably broader, as a whole it investigates trends of the canon more than truly a priori characteristics of hypertext. One of her criterion is definitive without being restrictive or arbitrary, but her other criteria are either questionable (at the least) or they repeat orthodox visions of the medium (at most). An additional misfortune is the determinacy with which she gives her own list, claiming that "it is far better for us to define just what hypertext fiction and digital narratives are and what they can do by examining what they do that print does not -- or cannot -- do"(39). Douglas's list reads like it's etched in stone, but I read it as the first of many drafts trying to more openly define hypertext.