"What if scholarly books were peer reviewed by anonymous blog comments rather than by traditional, selected peer reviewers?" So begins a piece by Jeffrey Young recently published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, considering the "experiment" currently taking place on the blog Grand Text Auto . In collaboration with MIT Press and the Institute for the Future of the Book , University of California at San Diego assistant professor of communication Noah Wardrip-Fruin is posting to this “group blog about computer narrative, games, poetry, and art” excerpts from a draft in progress of his forthcoming book, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies.

At its peak, Grand Text Auto reportedly receives more than 200,000 visits per month. “This is the community whose response I want, not just the small circle of academics,” says Wardrip-Fruin, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. (Wardrip-Fruin’s editor at MIT Press approves of this experiment in unorthodox, blog-based review, but has insisted on a traditional peer review process as well.)