What happens when a recognized form of scientific communication such as the scientific conference is put onto the Web? An experiment was run in late 2001 on the site www.text-e.org created for this purpose. For six months researchers and practitioners interested in changes in writing published lectures in the form of digital books and discussed them in a forum. A subsequent survey on participants in this entirely virtual conference highlighted diversity in ways of appropriating texts. It also revealed that a social game was initiated during the conference, through the representations that the participants projected onto the event, based on their own experience of traditional conferences.