Digital publishing is much on the minds of publishers, authors, and readers these days, since Yale law professor Yochai Benkler came out with his new book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. In this comprehensive social theory of the Internet, Benkler describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing–and shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people can create and express themselves. Case in point: The book, alongside the usual print version, can be downloaded in its entirety–for free–from his website.

The project, which Benkler calls “simply an experiment of how books might be in the future,” has been greeted with enthusiasm by some. The New York Times reported this weekend that the book has been accessed electronically by upwards of 15,000 to 20,000 people, several of whom have added their own comments and links to the online version. Champions of digital publishing see this as a step toward an electronic library of the future, which would open up new avenues of research and prove a windfall for obscure authors trying to make their voice heard.

Others have derided a future of publishing where a book can be downloaded from the Internet as easily as a song onto your iPod. As the Times reports, “The dread was perhaps most eloquently crystallized last month in Washington at the BookExpo, the publishing industry’s annual convention, when the novelist John Updike forcefully decried a digital future composed of free downloads of books and the mixing and matching of ‘snippets’ of text, calling it a ‘grisly scenario.'”

With the radical changes in information production that the Internet has produced, we stand at an important moment of transition, says Benkler in The Wealth of Networks. A range of legal and policy choices confront us, and there is much to be gained–or lost–by the decisions we make today.