Four university presses have been granted money from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to look into collaborating on a university-press e-book program, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports. Presses at New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers University, and Temple University have begun exploring ways to jointly tackle budget contractions and declining sales. Rutgers’ press director Marlie Wasserman, who is co-principal investigator on the grant, along with Steve Maikowski of NYU, spoke about the project: “The timing is, we think, urgent, because there are commercial ventures that are trying to do this as well and probably have more capital than we have,” she said. “We would like to be able to provide a nonprofit alternative.” Last year’s Association of American University Presses meeting in Montreal inspired the idea to join efforts digitally, Ms. Wasserman said. Eric Halpern of the University of Pennsylvania Press and Alex Holzman from Temple University Press have worked with Maikowski and Wasserman to secure funding from Mellon. All believe collective action will help move their organizations forward into the digital arena. “We’ve been positioned as anti-digital, which is preposterous,” Ms. Wasserman said. “There’s so much rhetoric now about everything moving to digital, and we’re perfectly willing to jump on that bandwagon if we can do it without losing our shirts.” When announced on the AAUP’s e-mail list, the venture received favorable feedback, Ms. Wasserman said. Over three dozen press directors “immediately responded and said, ‘How can we get in on this?”