Thinking about books, reading, and publishing as post-digital helps to contextualise the growing popularity of audiobooks, while avoiding narratives that emphasise the ‘death’ of the book.

Literary festivals are complex beasts. They’re simultaneously social spaces, cultural projects and political platforms. As providers of entertainment, drivers of tourist revenue and exercises in government branding – think ‘Melbourne: City of Literature’ – they cop flak for their commercialisation. Nevertheless, these festivals do work hard to build audiences for writers from marginalised backgrounds, and to program events that critique inequalities in contemporary publishing.