Accessible Versions of 56 Titles Cited by Yochai Benkler in The Wealth of Networks

KEI recently submitted comments to the US Copyright Office regarding the upcoming Treaty for the Blind. One element of those comments was a test of the availability of books in reading-accessible format.

We picked a book that all of us in the office (and most of our readers, likely) are familiar with—Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. I combed through the notes, marking every book that Benkler cited. (Because journals, websites, and newspaper articles have more variable levels of accessibility, I limited my search to books.

Next, I searched for versions of these books that are accessible to reading disabled persons. I used the five largest English-language Accessible Books databases, spanning three countries: Recording For the Blind and Dyslexic (RFB&D), the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS), and BookShare.Org in the United States; the books database at the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB); and the library database at the Royal National Institute of Blind people (RNIB) in the United Kingdom.

“Accessible format” was defined as any format which permitted the use of assistive technology. This included braille, electronic braille, DAISY, downloadable audio, CD audio, HTML and text formats. All books were checked against all five databases twice; once for title, and once for author, to avoid any possible errors in the databases’ titles.

Of 56 books cited in The Wealth of Networks, only 11 (19.64%) were available in some accessible format, and only one (Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig) was available under a global license. In Canada, only two books (including Free Culture) were available to reading disabled persons. In the UK, two books (again including Free Culture) were available for reading disabled persons. In addition, two of the total 11 were only available in alternate editions or compilations, different from Benkler’s citation. All 11 were available from at least one of the three major American databases (RFB&D, NLS, BookShare).

The 45 remaining books (80.36%) were unavailable in any of the five leading sources of English language works.

What was interesting (to me, at least) was the lack of correlation between publication year and availability. The few accessible books were published anywhere from 1951 to 2004, and while the “available” list was a little heavy on books from the 90s and 00s, the “unavailable” list ran the gamut. (Also, is it more than a little ironic that a book called Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights can’t be accessed by blind readers?)

The note I submitted to the Library of Congress is available in PDF format here.

Below is the complete list of cited books. The first table lists those books available through one or more of the five sources, and notes the particular format in which each book was made available. The second table lists those books which were only available in an edition or compilation separate from the one cited by Benkler. At the end are the titles of the 45 books that are not available through any of the five leading English-language sources for accessible format works.

Books Not Available in Accessible Formats

James M. Acheson, The Lobster Gangs of Maine, 1988
Anne Alstott and Bruce Ackerman, The Stakeholder Society, 1999
Gleason Archer, History of Radio to 1926, 1971
C. Edwin Baker, Media, Markets, and Democracy, 2002
Albert-Laszio Barbasi, Linked, How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life, 2003
Peter Bernholz and Gerald Radnitsky (eds), Economic Imperialism: The Economic Approach Applied Outside the Field of Economics, 1987

Donald Black (ed), Toward a Theory of Social Control, Fundamentals, 1984
James W. Carrey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, 1989
Manuel Castells, The Rise of Networked Society (1st & 2nd ed), 1996
Ithiel de Sola-Pool, Technologies of Freedom, 1983
Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan, Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior, 1985
S.N. Dorogovstev and J.E.F. Mendes, Evolution of Networks: From Biological Nets to the Internet and WWW, 2003
Elizabeth Einstein, Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 1979
Robert Evenson and D. Gollin (eds) Crop Variety Improvement and Its Effect on Productivity: The Impact of International Agricultural Research, 2002

Bruno S. Frey, Not Just for Money: An Economic Theory of Personal Motivation, 1997
Bruno S. Frey, Inspiring Economics: Human Motivation in Political Economy, 2001
Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift, 1999
Mark Granovetter, Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers, 1974
Jurgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Contributions to Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, 1996
James E. Katz and Ronald E. Rice, Social Consequences of Internet Use: Access, Involvement, Interaction, 2002
Duncan Kennedy, Sexy Dressing Etc.: Essays on the Power and Politics of Cultural Identity, 1993
Jack R. Kloppenburg, Jr., First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology 1492-2000, 1988
Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights, 1995

Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, 1999
Nan Lin, Social Capital: A Theory of Social Structure and Action, 2001
Rich Ling and P. Pedersen (eds), Mobile Communications: Re-Negotiation of the Social Sphere, 2005
Robert Waterman McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935, 1993
Glyn Moody, Rebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source Revolution, 2001
Richard Nelson (ed), Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity: Economic and Social Factors, 1962
Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, 1990
Jeremy Popkin, News and Politics in the Age of Revolution: Jean Luzac’s Gazzette de Leyde, 1989

C.K. Prahald, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits, 2005
Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs, The Next Social Revolution, 2002
Philip T. Rosen, Modern Stentors: Radio Broadcasters and the Federal Government, 1980
Herbert Simon, Models of Man Social and Rational: Mathematical Essays on Rational Human Behavior in a Social Setting, 1957
Carol Tenopir and Donald W King, Towards Electronic Journals: Realities for Scientists, Librarians, and Publishers, 2000
Richard M. Titmuss, The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy, 1971
Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, 1995
Mahbub ul Haq and Khadija ul Haq, Human Development in South Asia 1998: The Education Challenge, 1998
Edna Ullman-Margalit, The Emergence of Norms, 1977

Harold Varmus, E-Biomed: A Proposal for Electronic Publications in the Biomedical Sciences, 1999
Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation, 2005
D.J. Watts, Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks Between Order and Randomness, 1999
Steve Weber, The Success of Open Source, 2004
Langdon Winner (ed), The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, 1986