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Why is it important to distinguish between electronic incunabula and native hypertext? Being by definition so large, the idea of hypertext can easily contain multitudes -- and so we have "Romantic" versus "pragmatic,"hypertexts"(Charney 1992); exploratory" versus "constructive" hypertexts (Joyce 1988); "smooth" versus "chunky" hypertexts (Nelson 1990) -- why add one more taxonomic pair?
Because the distinction is important. As I have argued elsewhere, hypertext rhetoric needs to expand beyond literary categories imported from print (1991). Trigg and Irish were right when they noticed "an inherent contradiction in the notion of using hypertext for writing papers" (1987, 89). Hypertext isn't just for papers anymore. If we continue to regard it as such we may find ourselves in an intractable position.