Joel Waldfogel
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Freakonomics Radio · 693. What’s Our Job as Humans Anymore?
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Why Did the Number of E-books on Amazon Triple?
Stephen Dubner reports Joel Waldfogel's finding that the number of e-books on Amazon tripled between 2022 and late 2025, and that AI accounts for essentially the whole increase.
More than half the books released in 2025 used AI, and almost 100 percent of the increase came from authors who arrived after ChatGPT existed. Waldfogel calls the pattern the random long tail. The long tail was access to books that already exist. The random long tail is what happens when making a book gets cheaper and a mass of new books appears. Most of that new work is bad, and some of it is good, including work that would not have existed otherwise. He points to music as the earlier case: between 2000 and 2008, t
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How Many Creative Products Earn Back Their Cost?
Joel Waldfogel says maybe 5 or 10 percent of creative products that get substantial investments earn out their advances and make more money than they cost to make. Commercial success in music, books, movies, and television is unpredictable.
Waldfogel is a professor at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management and also spends time in the economics department and the law school. He has studied the economics of creative industries for a few decades. Copyright used to be a sleepy topic, and now it is exciting. He focuses on products that can be digitized, stored as ones and zeros, and distributed in digital form. Recording, promoting, and distributing used to be very expensive, s