2023 is the final year of our project: ‘Discovering a ‘Good Read’: Cultural Pathways to Reading for Australian Teens in a Digital Age’. Earlier this year we published a newsletter providing an update on our research activities in 2022 and a preview of some our findings about how much Australian teenagers read for pleasure and the types of books they enjoy reading.
You can read the newsletter in full here
The team recently hosted a successful public panel at Waterfront Library, to share research and industry insights about keeping teenagers reading in an age of distractions. The event was aligned with the Australian Reading Hour, a national celebration of Australians’ love of reading hosted by the Australian Publishers Association. It was aimed primarily at parents and those who share books with teens.
Presenting on behalf of the Cultural Pathways ARC Linkage Team were Associate Professor Leonie Rutherford and Research Fellow Dr Bronwyn Reddan. Danielle Binks, YA author and literary agent, and Christine Oughred, from the Children’s Book Council Shadow Judging Project. The panel gave their perspectives on adolescents’ engagement with literature, insights about reading preferences, and tips about what to do, and not to do, to encourage reading.
Waterfront Library Public Event Area
The event which was held on Monday 27 April was a new partnership with Deakin Library as the first of the library’s public events program. The panel was recorded on video and will be available via the Teen Reading website and YouTube Channel once edited.
In this paper we investigated whether there might be structures within the book industry that mitigate against publishing a greater quantity of diverse stories, or that might hinder a search for more diverse authors or a diverse readership. We interviewed a range of Australian publishing representatives. Through our questions we sought to understand how readers are understood or imagined by publishers, as well as the industry processes by which young adult titles are acquired. We found that two processes contributed to the lack of information about audiences: the over-riding value of the “good story” as a criterion for publishing a title; and the reliance on sales data as evidence of reader demand. Missing are mechanisms that provide insight into the preferences of real readers. Without this market feedback publishers are more likely to imagine readers, and readerships, to be “just like them”. This creates barriers to the creation of new and more diverse readerships and, thus, to new markets.
You can read the full article here
Team member and Deakin University PhD candidate Anne-Marie May is researching how booksellers and librarians influence teen recreational reading at the physical sites of bookstores, school libraries, and public libraries. She takes a geographically located approach to investigate the sites of book culture and the networks between them that comprise a local reading ecology for teens. Anne-Marie has selected an inner-Melbourne local government area for her study for its distribution and density of secondary school campuses, public library branches, and independent bookstores, as well as for the cultural and socio-economic diversity of its residents.
Anne-Marie identifies and analyses intermediary practices that impact teen recreational reading from data collected in interviews with booksellers and librarians, and focus groups with secondary school-aged students. These include direct and indirect practices such as book talk, readers’ advisory, read-alikes, shelf-talkers, promotion of local authors, gatekeeping, displays, genrefication of collections, and book clubs. Affective labour underpins the practices of booksellers and librarians and is key to their networks. Anne-Marie’s work promotes understanding the commonalities and differences between the occupation groups, the barriers they face implementing their practices and how their specific positions in a localised reading ecology impacts their work with teen recreational reading. By doing so, her study aims to answer how these cultural intermediaries can increase their impact on teen recreational reading.
Team member and QUT PhD candidate Amy Schoonens is researching the consumption practices of YA fiction on social media by teens and other content creators (including authors and publishers). Amy explores the ways teens use their reading experience to engage in digital and social media spaces creatively, critically, socially, and in ways that represent an extension of their book engagement and recreational reading practices. These practices include: