Academic integrity and audiobooks : exploring the transposition of referencing materials

Audiobooks offer increased accessibility and new ways of engaging with scholarly texts. Although the development of academic audiobooks is in a relatively early stage, one significant issue that is yet to receive appropriate attention is the presentation of referenced materials in audio form. Presently, this is approached on a case-by-case basis with no centralized industry standards, and so protocols are either set by individual publishers or negotiated between rights-holders and narrators. Narrators usually adopt one of four options for dealing with notes or other referencing tools: complete omission; addition of audio effects to differentiate the reading of references from the primary narrative; reading the reference notes at the end of a chapter or the book; or including with the audiobook files an optional PDF download with reference details. These options give consideration to aesthetic issues, but it is uncertain whether they do justice to questions of academic integrity. The purpose of this article is to encourage scholarly dialogue and a conversation between the audio publishing industry and academia on this issue, and to begin working towards a 'best practice' framework that satisfies questions of both aesthetic experience and academic integrity.