Did you know that most Australian books have fallen out of print and are unavailable for purchase or loan from libraries? This includes important local and national histories, biographies and memoirs, beloved children’s titles, and even winners of the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

With funding from state and territory libraries, philanthropists, and the Australian Research Council, Untapped has identified some of the most culturally important lost books, digitised them, made them available as ebooks, and – as of July – in print as well, bringing them to new generations of readers. The ongoing and active involvement and engagement of state and public libraries has been and will continue to be essential to the success of Untapped and its new digital and hardcopy print runs.

ALIA and Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia (IPRIA) are delighted to co-host an online Research Review Seminar to explore this amazing collaboration between authors, libraries and researchers.

Thurs 9 June
1:00 pm to 2:00 pm
Online; register here.

We will be joined by Professor Rebecca Giblin (University of Melbourne), Dr Paul Crosby (Macquarie University), Allayne L. Webster (author), Matt Rubinstein (Publisher, Ligature) and a representative from Booktopia. They’ll be talking about the wonderful initiatives libraries are using to introduce these books to new generations of readers, sharing some surprising data about how the collection is circulating, providing details of the print launch, and explaining just how this research aims to support an Australian book industry in which both publishers and libraries can flourish.

Booktopia and Brio Books are thrilled to be partnered with Untapped to be able to make print editions of this wonderful selection of Australian classics available to a much wider audience. All those attending the ALIA Untapped webinar will receive a link to order a FREE copy of Peter Singer’s iconic book, The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty.

Read more in a Guardian article about the project here

Professor Rebecca Giblin is an ARC Future Fellow at Melbourne Law School, leading interdisciplinary teams to build evidence about how intellectual property arrangements and other regulations work in practice. Her main research areas are copyright, creators’ rights, access to knowledge and the regulation of culture (particularly how the law impacts the creation and dissemination of creative works). She is Director of the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia (IPRIA) and leads the ARC-funded Author’s Interest and eLending projects, as well as Untapped: the Australian Literary Heritage Project. Her upcoming book CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM (with Cory Doctorow, Sept 2022) analyses how Big Tech and Big Content has captured creative labour markets, and what we can do to win them back. She tweets via @rgibli.

Dr Paul Crosby is a Senior Lecturer in Economics at the Macquarie Business School, Macquarie University. He is an applied microeconomist with research interests in the economics of digitisation, entertainment, culture, and consumer choice. Paul’s work has been published in a variety of leading international, peer-reviewed economics journals. His work has also been featured in media outlets such as Fortune Magazine, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Conversation, ABC TV, ABC Radio, and Smart Company. His work has been presented at a series of invited talks in Australia, Europe, and South Africa.

Allayne L. Webster is an author of Junior Fiction, Middle Grade and Young Adult literature. She’s an ambassador for the SA Premier’s Reading Challenge and has served for ten years on the board of the Salisbury Writers Festival. Paper Planes (Scholastic) was a 2016 Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Notable and shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, and has since been included in the Untapped Project, A Cardboard Palace (Midnight Sun) was a 2018 CBCA Notable, Our Little Secret (Scholastic) was listed for the Golden Inkys, The Centre of My Everything (Penguin Random House) was listed in the 2019 Davitt Awards and shortlisted in the 2020 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, Sensitive (UQP) was shortlisted in the 2020 Australian Speech Pathology Awards. Allayne recently released a comedy YA novel That Thing I Did (Wakefield Press) and her YA/MG novel, Selfie will be out in 2023 (Text).

Matt Rubinstein is a writer, publisher and lawyer. He wrote the novels Solstice, Nomad, and A Little Rain on Thursday, which was runner-up for the Australian/Vogel’s award and published internationally. His stage adaptation of Solstice was performed by the South Australian Theatre Company for the Adelaide Festival, and he co-wrote the feature film adaptation of Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation. In 2012 Matt’s essay on the history and future of copyright and e-books won the Australian Book Review’s Calibre prize and led to the founding of Ligature, a digital-first publishing venture that has now digitised and republished around 200 titles from more than 100 Australian authors. Ligature is proud to be a partner in the Untapped project.

Register via Zoom here

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