The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an article on CommentPress!
Here is a quote:
With CommentPress, released in July by the Institute for the Future of the Book, designers have endeavored to help digital books capture the immediacy and interactivity of the margin
note. “Text is meant to be a conversation,” says Ben Vershbow, an associate director at the institute, which is sponsored by the University of Southern California but is based in Brooklyn. “We’ve tried to create a reading environment that is more dynamic than you’d usually find on
a Web site.”
And:
The program — a template used with WordPress, a popular open-source blogging program — lets any scholar convert a book or paper into a digital text that can be analyzed and
commented upon by many readers.That stands in sharp contrast to digital books, some of which come strewn with hyperlinks that let readers simulate the experience of moving from footnote to footnote, but don’t let
readers interact.Traditional blogs let authors excerpt from books and then provide space beneath the text for readers to add their own comments. But CommentPress’s innovation, according to Mr.
Vershbow, is to “slightly rejigger the hierarchy of discussion, by putting comments next to text.” While a blog might support one linear conversation, he says, CommentPress lets
readers pull out multiple strands of text to start their own distinct discussions.