There are many important aspects of electronic texts and a vast potential of uses that electronic databases can have. Although electronic texts can be useful, scholars must remember that today only "one tenth of 1 percent" of texts on the web can be considered "reliable scholarly work." People with a passion for literature and an interest in the Internet produce these texts, so they are not necessarily experts in the field. Therefore, their credibility as an editor should be questioned. These "unmarked" texts make learning even harder for students and scholars. Therefore, scholars need to develop a list of "approved electronic editions."

With a growing increase in electronic editions of texts, detailed markup systems, like TEI, have developed to make online texts easier to produce. However, that does not mean the job is an easy one. There are examples of many successful electronic projects that already exist. These examples show how such projects can be used by various scholars for different purposes. This leads electronic texts users to a main concern about how print and electronic editions are used by their audiences and how archives are supposed to work.

Most importantly, electronic text editors must attempt to understand what an electronic project can teach the worker through trial and error. The learning process is what helps the editor learn new ways of presenting the online texts for different usability needs. Editors, though, are concerned about not remaining objective in their work. However, it is not possible to ever remain objective in editorial work because decisions about the text must be made. In fact, readers need editors to make decisions and provide guidance for a text, and electronic editions allow for multiple types of editorical decisions. The reader can choose for themselves which version they want to see.

Before this idea can be made useful, many decisions must be made about how to approach the electronic editing in a uniform way. What will electronic texts look like? How will users recognize hypertext links? Who will make all of these decisions and how? Some problems include changing software editions and questions of how the reader should view the text. A project so large as this will require many kinds of people with a diverse knowledge of editing skills and knowledge about how to show this information electronically.

No matter what editors do, no edition of a text can look like or work like the original. On the other hand, electronic databases of text can make texts available to people who would not otherwise have access to that text. These online versions will not look and smell like the originals, which changes the reader's interaction with the text, but any interaction is better than no interaction. Electronic editions have more positive attributes than negative, such as the ability to change over time as new information is gained and when new editors have more to contribute to the text. More importantly, a user will be able to choose how he or she wants to view the information, depending on the purpose of his or her research. Lastly, with a project so large, an electronic scholar's work is never finished. The lingering question becomes, Who will take on such a large task?