Zicherman was formerly CTO of Anchor, the self-publishing podcast company Spotify acquired in 2019. “It’s important for us to deliver a great experience for the people behind the audiobooks we all love, and you can expect that we’ll start providing some exciting creator-facing features soon.” Spotify has an opportunity “to apply our learnings around creators to uplift the authors and publishers whose content is now on Spotify,” Zicherman said. Upon returning to Spotify, the book will be automatically saved in their library and available to listen whenever they want.Īudiobook features in Spotify include: the ability to download content for offline listening automatic bookmarking to save your place and pick up where you left off speed controls to speed up or slow down the pace of playback and a rating feature, which will publicly display the aggregate rating of the book.
But you can’t buy them via an in-app purchase: Users must buy audiobooks from Spotify on a web page using a credit card - thereby avoiding transaction fees levied by Apple’s App Store and Google Play. In the Spotify app, audiobooks will show up with a lock icon on the play button (indicating they need to be purchased in order to listen).
“Audiobooks are next to come into the picture because we see a substantial untapped market.” Per Spotify’s estimates, audiobooks represent just a 6%-7% share of the wider book market, but the category is growing by 20% year over year. “We’ve always believed that the potential for audio is limitless, and have been saying for a while now that our ambition is to be the complete package for everyone’s listening needs,” Zicherman said in a statement. Spotify’s entry into the audiobook market comes after closing its acquisition for audiobook distributor Findaway in June, paying about $119 million in cash for the company.
0 kommentar(er)
