Books will soon be available on Spotify The Swedish platform wants to change the way we read, listen to and buy books
On February 5, Spotify announced a partnership with Bookshop.org to sell physical books through its app. Starting this spring, USA and UK users will find an “Add to your bookshelf at home” button on the pages of the audiobooks they are reading and with one click they will be redirected to Bookshop.org, which will handle everything (pricing, inventory, shipping), while Spotify will earn a commission.
The move comes two years after the launch of audiobooks on Spotify, an expansion of the audio platform that has already proven successful. In fact, according to the data released by the Swedish company, new listeners are growing by 36% year over year, while listening hours have increased by 37%. The English-language catalog now includes over 500,000 titles, distributed across 22 global markets. But the real shift is not so much in the number of books available, rather in the way Spotify is trying to make different formats interact, ultimately including the physical book.
The new app features for audiobooks
@verge Spotify has launched a new feature called Page Match that lets you quickly sync your spot in a physical or ebook with an audiobook. Point your camera at a page, and the Spotify app uses computer vision to match text with audio. #spotify #pagematch #audiobook #booktok original sound - The Verge
Along with the announcement of physical book sales, Spotify also launched, only in the Anglo-Saxon market, Page Match, a feature that could truly change the way we read and listen. The idea is very simple: you open the app, scan the page you are reading in the physical book with your smartphone camera and Spotify takes you exactly to that point in the audiobook. It also works the other way around: you start listening on the app, photograph any page of the physical book and Page Match will tell you where to resume reading.
«We believe the future of reading or listening must be flexible and better adapt to people’s lives,» said Owen Smith, Global Head of Audiobooks at Spotify. And indeed, Page Match responds to the real need of having to choose whether to keep reading or switch to the audiobook because we are leaving the house, losing our place and then having to search for the exact point where we left off.
Why Spotify wants to sell paper in the digital era
At this point, the question arises spontaneously: why would a streaming platform enter a notoriously low-margin market such as publishing, which is also dominated by giants like Amazon?
According to TechCrunch, the answer lies in a revenue diversification strategy. Spotify has made similar attempts in recent years, first with podcasts and then with audiobooks. But there is actually more. In 2024, physical books accounted for 73% of commercial publishing revenue in the United States and despite the digital boom, Generation Z continues to prefer paper books, for reasons ranging from the tactile experience to the desire to disconnect from screens, according to what was written by the Los Angeles Times.
Hence the partnership with Bookshop.org which, unlike Amazon, redistributes profits to local independent bookstores. «By meeting readers where they are and connecting them to Bookshop.org, Spotify is financially supporting independent booksellers with every purchase,» said Andy Hunter, founder and CEO of Bookshop.org. The idea is to transform audiobook listening into a gateway for purchasing the physical copy, creating a virtuous cycle that keeps the user within the Spotify ecosystem while simultaneously supporting neighborhood bookstores.
Doubts and precedents
@curatorofchic Why books have become the ultimate status symbol & thinking is now a luxury good #reading #booktok #statussymbol #trendanalysis #trends Presentation - wouldliker
Naturally, there are doubts. TikTok had tried to enter the publishing market with 8th Note Press, a publishing house launched to capitalize on the BookTok phenomenon, but the experiment quietly shut down last year. The difference with Spotify lies in the fact that Bookshop.org is independent while 8th Note Press was a publishing house built ex novo.
But beyond numbers and corporate strategies, what is happening with Spotify and books tells us something more about our relationship with culture. We no longer want to choose between digital and physical, between listening and reading — we want everything in the format that suits us.
Page Match and the paper book are the perfect example of this philosophy: it is not an attempt to replace the physical book with the audiobook or vice versa, but to make them coexist and interact. Read at home on the couch, listen on the subway, resume reading in the park. The book adapts to your life, not the other way around. Whether we like it or not, the way we consume culture is changing once again and this time, paper is not the retro alternative to digital, but its accomplice.
