The team from the Institute for the Future of the Book team have announced the release of digress.it, a completely overhauled version of the old Commentpress theme for WordPress, which allowed paragraph-level commenting. Digress.it is a plugin which
offers paragraph-level commenting in the margins of a text. digress.it is based on the architecture of weblogs, but is geared toward in-depth discussions of longer documents: article, essay or even book-length. With digress.it, you can annotate, gloss, workshop and debate on a fine-grained level, turning a document into a conversation.
I worked on the old Commentpress platform to get it running in English and French, and contributed some minor bug fixes, and really liked the idea behind the project, so this is an exciting development to see. I haven’t explored the plugin yet, but hopefully it will make the functionality much easier to integrate into an existing WordPress installation.