“For this reason,” Hayles argues, “it would be more accurate to call a digital text a process rather than an object”—a distinction that leads her to refer to “the time of performance for an electronic text versus the time of production for print”
Because printed text is tangible and the content remains the same after it is created, we can call the process of creating it a "production". But because a digital text is transferrable and changeable, it is more of a system that performs.