Doing Audiobook Bibliography: Creating and Analysing Audiobook Data in AustLit

Audiobook publishing has grown substantially over the past decade, to the point that publishers now consider audiobooks the ‘fourth format’ alongside hardbacks, paperbacks and ebooks. This growth is evident in regard to both the rapidly increasing volume of audiobooks published and the sale of audiobooks. However, a lack of reliable data about audiobook publishing confounds efforts to understand the scope and significance of these shifts, intensified by audiobooks’ absence in national collecting institutions. This article discusses the bibliographic data created and analysed through the Australian Research Council project Audiobooks and Digital Book Culture in partnership with the major information resource AustLit: an effort to create and analyse the first comprehensive record of Australian audiobooks, and through this to understand the titles, publishers and individuals operating in this space historically and in the contemporary moment. Popular discourse about audiobooks tends to fixate on questions about the relationship between audiobooks and print: whether or not they ‘count’ as books, and whether reading an audiobook ‘counts’ as reading. In one sense, we respond with the literal ‘counting’ of audiobooks. This article argues that bibliography, specifically the use through AustLit of the FRBR bibliographic data model, offers a precise and concrete language as well as a methodology that enables us to resolve these kinds of questions, and through this provides an evidence base to argue for audiobooks’ cultural significance and distinctiveness.