Please join us for next week’s CuSPP seminar:

Digital Publishing Collectives and Public Domain Audiobooks

Thursday 19 April, 1pm, Milgate Room, AD Hope Bldg, SLLL

Cooperative digital publishing enterprises enrich the public domain and model productive collaborative practices in an increasingly hostile online world. This talk examines one of these enterprises, Librivox, whose volunteers create free audiobooks of public domain texts. Working in the intersection of innovative social, cultural and professional missions, Librivox volunteers have produced nearly 11,000 audiobooks. This talk positions Librivox as literary repository, new media form, practice and community. It demarcates Librivox’s relationship to other digital repositories such as Project Gutenberg and non-literary volunteer-driven enterprises such as Wikipedia. It also scopes out a project that understands Librivox within broader publishing industry trends, including the uptick in audiobook listening, and the rise of volunteerism and precarious employment in related creative industries.

Dr Millicent Weber is a Lecturer in English at the ANU. Her first monograph, Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan later this year. She co-convenes the annual Independent Publishing Conference, and has written  on contemporary literary culture for scholarly and literary journals including  Convergence, Continuum, and Overland.

Image credit: Humane Pursuits, ‘Exploring the World of Librivox’