A University Press Report

A few days ago, Charkin Blog mentioned a report on University Publishing in a Digital Age. Its an interesting report and Peter Brantley mentions it today. Brantley links to a location where the report can be read and commented upon in CommentPress "an open source theme for the WordPress blog engine that allows paragraph-by-paragraph commenting in the margins of a text". What an interesting idea, and congratulations to the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan and the Institute for the Future of the Book for putting it to work. Simple but very effective and I hope that they get a lot of comments (is this the first?). The Ithaka report is exactly the kind of consultative/informative document for which the CommentPress solution is well suited.

The University of Michigan has been at the front of the charge with Google's Book Search. But its time the libraries began to steer the Google Book Search project. So its encouraging to see the American universities and their presses begining to seize the challenge of digital publishing.