For experienced readers reading is a continual process of making inferences, evaluating the validity and significance of texts, relating them to prior experience, knowledge and viewpoint, and considering implications. Such psychological accounts do not suggest that a text means whatever a reader wants it to mean, but simply that readers must make active use of schemata to make sense of the text, and that different readers may employ different schemata and may vary in their interpretations. Reading is not passive 'information retrieval' and a text does not have a single, unchanging meaning. He stressed meaning-making as a process, not as the 'extraction' of 'content', but he limited the possible range of readers' meanings by stressing the importance of 'interpretative communities'. Of course, the extent to which the reader is involved in constructing meaning depends partly on the kind of text involved.
Some texts are more 'open' than others.
For instance, one would usually expect more active interpretation by the reader to be involved with a poem than with a telephone directory. Texts of the writerly kind invite the active participation of the reader, and also, in their attention to linguistic mediation, an involvement in the construction of reality. Ironically, it is readerly texts which tend to be described as 'readable', whilst writerly texts are often referred to as 'unreadable' because they require more effort. In passing, it is worth noting that the extension of Barthes's notion to other media could be productive, involving a consideration of the extent to which engagement with such media might be regarded as userly or makerly. Returning to readers and texts, the degree of a reader's involvement depends not only on the type of text and on how readerly or writerly it may be, but on how the text is used.