Veronica St. Pierre

@millicentweber.bsky.social

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Senior lecturer and DECRA fellow in literature at the Australian National University. Audiobooks, writers festivals, digital technology. Books! Books? Books. https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/weber-m

(7) 40% of Australians consider listening to an audiobook to "count" as reading.
- 40.0% of Australian respondents considered audiobook consumption a form of reading. By comparison, only 21.2% of German respondents to the survey we conducted in parallel considered audiobook consumption a form of reading.

(6) Listeners who haven’t tried AI-narrated audiobooks are neutral or ambivalent rather than definitively opposed.
- These made up 57.6% of respondents who haven’t tried AI narration.

(5) The uptake of AI narration is highest among listeners with vision and hearing impairments.
- Accessibility needs to be more prominent in conversations about AI narration.

(4) Most people have never listened to an AI-narrated audiobook.
- 17.4% have tried an AI-narrated audiobook or other text-to-speech technology at least once. Men are more likely than women to have listened to an AI-narrated audiobook.

(3) Male listeners listen almost exclusively to male narrators, while female listeners listen to both male and female narrators evenly.
- 81.4% of men and 45.3% of women most recently listened to a book narrated by a male narrator. This asymmetry, with potential implications for casting decisions, may reflect trends in print publishing and reading and genre trends; it may also reflect listener preferences for gender identification with the narrator.

(2) The Australian market is dominated by US accents.
- 37.6% of respondents’ ‘most recent listens’ had a US-accented narrator, compared to only 22.1% with Australian-accented narrators. The Australian audiobook market is dominated by international platforms, with minimal production and distribution infrastructure available to independent authors and narrators.

(1) Audiobook listeners are regular consumers.
- Nearly three-fifths (59.2%) of audiobook readers listen to an audiobook at least once a week. Once people begin consuming audiobooks, they quickly become habitual listeners.

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