I am very much in favour of the ideas underpinning CommentPress and have often felt a need for receiving more immediate feedback on my own writings and for giving response to others. However, before commenting a paper, I like to read it trough, reflecting on its content and getting an impression on the overall argument (often underlining parts of the text and making annotations). Unfortunately CommentPress neither provide an online reading mode nor a print version of the article. I therefore rely on the version I printed from the JEP archive for this kind of sustained and reflective reading. When I now comment, I have the printed and annotated version in front of me at the same time as I write the comments and scroll through the CommentPress text.

This is how I work (and studies indicate that this is a very common way of working). Taking the many different ways we read and use documents and texts into consideration, I believe you overstate your point when, using CommonPress as an example, you claim it is necessary to replace the codex-form with a web-native form. What is the necessity? And how do you think one form can replace numerous other forms?

Here Stallybrass obviously makes a very good point, but he still holds on to the concept of a “page”, which is also a codex/book-concept. In print the size and contents of a page is fixed, whereas in much digital publishing (e.g. in e-book readers) re-flow or adapted layout is an important principle. Digital publishing has long suffered under the “tyranny of the page”, especially as PDF has been such a dominant format.

(By the way: This is my third comment and none of the others have yet turned up on the site, a delay that gives an annoying impression of a behind-the-scenes editing process.)