While we thought of digital as a future avenue for education, the government has decided to tighten the screws on the Culture Pass : the budget dedicated to streaming, online press and audio books is now cut in half, in favor of uses deemed more “virtuous”. Enough to worry those who have been fighting for years the cultural hierarchy which wants to pit “good literature” against the rest of the market.
Here is what actually changes
A decree published in the Official Journal on December 30, 2025 reviews the rules for using the Culture Pass, in particular for digital offers. The maximum cumulative amount for online offers is now set at 50€, compared to 100€ until now. This concerns subscriptions to musical services, audiovisual works, video games, audio books, but also conferences and the dematerialized press. This limit applies to the total validity period of the individual credit, and not per year or per platform.
Digital books, which were previously explicitly excluded from this ceiling, are no longer mentioned in the new decree, which leaves the government position on them unclear.
Slow down on digital
This turning point comes in a context of global reform of the Culture Pass, marked by a drop in individual credits and an increasing priority given to collective budgets (allocated to school outings in particular). The system is now structured in two stages: €50 at 17 years old, then €150 at 18 years old, for use until the user is 21 years old.
The reduction in the ceiling for streaming and the digital press is part of a budgetary logic, but also an ideological one: pushing young people towards physical purchases (books, cinema tickets, concerts) and real experiences rather than towards dematerialized subscriptions.
Paper versus screen
For users, this €50 cap will automatically limit the possibility of financing long-term subscriptions, depriving them of long-term cultural access. Conversely, bookstores, cinemas, performance venues or libraries could see this refocusing as an opportunity: books already remain the first category reserved on the Culture Pass (around 40% of the credit spent in 2024), ahead of cinema and music.
But this orientation above all raises a fundamental question: in a cultural landscape where young people’s practices are overwhelmingly digital, does limiting digital mean supporting uses or artificially restricting them? Implicitly, the Culture Pass gradually slides from an individual and libertarian check, to a tool for access to a specific category of culture. The reduction of the digital ceiling is not a simple technical adjustment: it is a political signal on the hierarchy of cultural practices deemed legitimate, and on the place that the State intends to leave for digital technology in the cultural education of young people.
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