Abstracts due Friday 12 September 2025 via email to millicent.weber@anu.edu.au

See also: https://www.asal.org.au/conferences/mini/cfp-asal-mini-conference/

Audiobooks have seen a recent and unexpected surge in popularity among Australian publishers and readers. AustLit began indexing audiobooks as distinct expressions in 2024 and has so far identified over 9,000 Australian audiobooks. Research conducted by Creative Australia in 2023 shows that over a third of Australians listen to audiobooks, and that they are particularly popular compared to print with Indigenous and Culturally and Linguistically Diverse readers. Yet the prevailing attitude towards audiobooks in Australia remains equivocal, with audiobooks not systematically collected in Australian cultural institutions such as the National Library of Australia or the National Film and Sound Archive, and unregulated by legislative bodies like the Australian Classifications Board. There remain significant barriers to the production and distribution of Australian audiobooks as a result of Australia’s peripheral relationship to the geopolitical publishing centres of the USA and UK. Australian writers, publishers and narrators are debarred from participating in ‘global’ marketplaces like Amazon’s Audiobook Creation eXchange (ACX), at the same time as Australian readers are prevented by territorial rights agreements from accessing notable Australian literary titles as audiobooks. Gerald Murnane’s Border Districts and Stream System, for example, are both available as audiobooks in the USA and the UK through a rights agreement between Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Audible, but cannot legally be purchased in Australia.

Helen Groth and Joseph Cummins have asked “whether it is possible to claim a distinct sonic texture for Australian literary and cultural formations”. This conference invites the extension of this question beyond the embedding of the sonic in the textual, to the realisation of the textual in the sonic. In asking what is distinctively Australian, and distinctively audiobookish, about Australian audiobooks, scholars are encouraged to consider all aspects of the incursions of audio technology in their teaching and research practice, from the new layers of interpretive possibility offered by audiobook versions of texts, to the development of methodologies suited to the audiobook form and its production and reception contexts, and the role of the audiobook in the tertiary undergraduate literary studies classroom. The audiobook is an inherently hybrid object from a disciplinary perspective, and interdisciplinary contributions, from media and communication studies, publishing studies, sound studies, music, library and information sciences, education, and other disciplinary areas are also warmly encouraged.

Potential topics might include, but are not limited to:

• readings—close, distant, computational, or otherwise—of audiobooks;

• audiobooks and/of Australian literature;

• audiobooks and/of Indigenous literature;

• audiobooks and disability;

• audiobooks and the politics of speaking/listening;

• phenomenological and/or empirical studies of audiobook listening;

• audiobooks and place;

• audiobooks, orality and literacy;

• narratological approaches to the study of audiobooks;

• book historical approaches to the study of audiobooks;

• audiobooks and materiality;

• audiobooks and systems of value and prestige, including reviewing and prizing;

• audiobooks in institutional contexts; audiobooks, digital archiving, and preservation;

• audiobooks and the labour of production, including book publishing and/or sound production;

• audiobooks and technological developments, including AI;

• audiobook circulation and distribution; and

• audiobooks in the classroom, including primary, secondary and tertiary classrooms.

This two-day conference will take place in-person on the ANU campus on the land of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people. It is supported by ARC DECRA Project DE240100466: Audiobooks and Digital Book Culture.

Abstracts of 200-300 words, plus a short bio, should be emailed to the conference convenor, Dr Millicent Weber at millicent.weber@anu.edu.au by Friday 12 September 2025. Abstracts for papers and formed panels are both welcome.