The Wealth of Networks - How social production transforms markets and freedom

I haven't written a review in almost two years. Not that I haven't read a book in that time. It's just that here been a few books that I didn't like or care for. And this particular book actually took almost five months to complete reading.

Although I have been enjoying reading computer books for the past ten years or so, I found out in recent years that there are quite a number of good books on the effects of the Internet on a social scale. This book is such an example.

I decided to buy the book after reading a few enthusiastic reviews about the book on the Internet. I had never considered the Internet from an economic perspective, apart from the obvious Venture Capital slash Dot Com Boom money-making spin from around the turn of the century. Yochai Benkler goes much further than that and places a variety of new activities that take place on the Internet or make use of the Internet in a context of economic and law studies. For someone like me, with an engineering degree and spending most of his time in computer code, it's quite refreshing to read a book from a completely different vantage point.

Benkler covers peer production, music copying, cable and wireless communication companies trying to control content, content providers trying to control networks, public interests in using the network, and so on. Benkler writes on these subjects in a sort of encyclopedic completeness, which gives the book a very authoritative and objective view on the subject. It clarifies why people are doing peer production activities such as editing Wikipedia entries in their spare time, and what results such efforts have on "the economy".

The book is recommended to anyone who regularly consults clients on business and communications strategies on the Internet. I haven't come across any other book that is so complete and stripped from "conference guru fluff".

Is this book for anyone? No. It's an academic title and as such it tries really hard to put readers off by using a terse kind of language with long sentences without any grammar help from commas, verbs and so on. That makes it a difficult read for any non-native English speaker. It took me five months to complete reading the book. I can't remember ever taking that long reading a single book. This book is in a whole different league than the fairly lightweight computer books you can find on the reading list on my website.