Digital Renaissance: What Data and Economics Tell Us About the Future of Popular Culture by Joel Waldfogel (review)

I started to read this book with quite some skepticism. Yes, I don't like the word "customer" when we talk of culture, and I am also one of those who think that the quality of life in an urban environment depends on the presence of a well-structured and dense network of bookshops (I mean real bookshops, not newsstands selling Fifty Shades of Grey). At the same time, I am well aware of the fact that culture without industry is neither thinkable nor desirable, although a primarily economic take on culture will never be totally unproblematic for me (is it necessary to mention once again the hollow pep talk of economists like Richard Florida?). And a last caveat: As a European and more precisely continental (read: Francophile) reader, I always feel uncomfortable with the ways in which U.S. scholars use terms such as "popular" and "elite."

But prejudices are never good, and I am grateful to Joel Waldfogel that he helped me get rid of quite some naive if not false ideas on culture and economics. There remain many conclusions and suggestions that I think are open to debate—and I will come back to some of them—but I truly appreciate the intellectual and methodological honesty of this book, as well as its basic claim to make room for evidence-based thinking in our inevitably ideological debates on culture. Moreover, Waldfogel is a modest author, whose concern for culture is far from exclusively driven by figures, revenues, return on investment and profit maximization. Cultural diversity and a good mix of guilty pleasure and intellectual challenge are key elements in his thinking, and it was good to see that the final horizon of his work is something everybody can and should endorse: the possibility given to all to create and enjoy culture as much as possible.

Waldfogel's message is both simple and highly surprising. Contrary to what many of those active or interested in the creative industries (in practice: music, movies, television and books) have been repeating, the digital revolution, which makes it so easy to reproduce, to circulate and thus also to steal copyrighted material, has not translated into a collapse of cultural production. From a quantitative point of view, one can only observe that the number of works being produced has been strongly increasing and continues to do so. And from a qualitative point of view, there may be signs that the audience considers the new works at least as appealing as those that were produced in the predigital era. In that sense, Waldfogel accepts that there are good reasons to believe that our age is that of a Renaissance not that of a decline. And according to him this Renaissance is not merely contemporary with the digital turn but can be explained by it for, thanks to the new technology, it has become possible to overcome the limitations of production and reception as defined by traditional forms of gatekeeping. It is now possible to produce at lower cost and distribute at almost no cost, and this evolution means that many works that could not previously be actually produced and distributed can now be made and made available to large audiences. This new situation helps us gain something (we can access more works at lower cost) but does not come without a loss. What we are losing to a certain extent—although Waldfogel tends to suggest that this idea or fear is not based on real evidence—is the protection offered by copyright law, which, when piracy becomes universal and endemic, can no longer function as an incentive to cultural creation. (As far as the publishing industry is concerned, I have strong doubts on this point, but the work on book production is definitely less convincing than the other sections of the research.) Waldfogel's book globally [sic] defends copyright as...