Millicent Weber: Audiobookishness: Expressing Attachment to Making and Reading Audiobooks

Abstract:

Contemporary bookish communities coalesce around the shared enjoyment of making and reading books. Dispersed across in-person, digital, and analogue sites and practices, ‘bookishness’ is a ‘fetishized focus on textuality and the book-bound reading object’ that becomes particularly salient as digital media challenge the primacy of print (Pressman, 2009: np). In this paper, I propose that the framework of ‘audiobookishness’ can be used to unpack how creators and readers express aesthetic and social attachments to audiobooks. Audiobooks offer their own versions of key bookish experiences of ‘proximity, interiority, authenticity’, while simultaneously challenging the physical book’s symbolising of ‘privacy, leisure, individualism, knowledge, and power’ (Pressman, 2020: 2).

Bio:

Dr Millicent Weber is an ARC DECRA Fellow on the project Audiobook and Digital Book Culture (DE240100466) and Senior Lecturer in English at the Australian National University. She researches twenty-first century book culture, with a particular interest in the production and consumption of digital audiobooks.

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