Johndan Johnson-Eilola, in Designing Effective Websites: A Concise Guide, argues that individuals who read hypertext are "users" rather than readers.

"If you're used to thinking about real-world people who work with documents, you may be more comfortable with the term readers. But this term doesn't get at a crucial aspect of successful, effective web sites—they are used. People look at the pages, skim or read them, click links, and move around the sites in ways that the more passive terms readers and audiences don't suggest" (Johnson-Eilola 1; italics and bold in original).

Obviously, readers of print texts are not necessarily passive recipients of the material they read. On Johnson-Eilola's view, however, "the contortions of those people [literary, feminist, and cultural studies theorists] are an attempt to wrangle traditional terms like reader and audience into a new form. Why not merely adopt a different term, one that already connotes activity and use for most users" (2; italics in original)? In a way, Johnson-Eilola's substitution of user for reader may actually help students see themselves as active readers.

Of course, the label "users" carries its own baggage. While readers do not necessarily take an instrumentalist view of the texts they encounter, the term user is deeply instrumentalist. A reader reads to learn, to understand, to be entertained, and to use the text. Do hypertext users work to understand the material presented on a website?

While the label user may help the hypertext author consider his or her reader more carefully in designing hypertext, help the reader/user of hypertext essays take a more active role as a reader/user, it may also invite partial reading (and misreading) under the guise of an instrumentalist notion of using the hypertext.

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