Last year, Spotify got into the audioboooks game and started to sell them individually, in a number of countries, such as Canada and the United States. In order to drive adoption, subscribers of Spotify Premium can listen to 15 hours of any single or multiple audiobooks in their catalogue. The company is hoping by letting millions of people try out audiobooks on their platform, that this will drive sales.
At a company event yesterday, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek announced that Spotify subscribers in the UK, Australia, and, in the winter, the US will be able to stream 15 hours of premium audiobooks each month. Readers can access audiobooks within the Premium catalogue, which Spotify says includes “upwards of 70% of bestselling books.” The catalogue has integrated books from major publishing houses like Hachette, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster. Hachette, for instance, is placing over 7,000 titles on Spotify, while HarperCollins and Penguin Random House have provided their entire audio collection to the platform.
After the initial 15-hour listening period is over, Spotify users can buy top-ups to continue listening to books, which should be $11 for another ten hours. The average audiobook is thought to take between eight and twelve hours of listening. So might focus on one title and finish it, or have ten books open and make their way through all of them slowly.
At the moment, the new perk is only available for individual Premium subscribers and to plan managers of Family or Duo accounts, but Spotify says it plans to expand its availability in the future.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.