Spotify expands audiobooks

Spotify is pushing deeper into books: its Audiobooks in Premium program is now live in 22 markets, and it added new discovery and shopping tools on April 15. (newsroom.spotify.com) The company said its audiobook catalog has grown from 150,000 titles to more than 700,000 since the program launched a little over two years ago. Spotify also said it now pays authors and publishers “hundreds of millions of dollars annually.” (newsroom.spotify.com) In the United States and United Kingdom, Spotify users can now buy printed books through Bookshop.org inside the Android app, and Spotify said iPhone users will get that option next week. The feature follows Spotify’s February announcement that it was moving into physical book sales with Bookshop.org. (newsroom.spotify.com) Spotify is also widening the tools it built to move listeners between formats. Its “Page Match” feature, which links an audiobook to a printed or electronic book edition, is expanding to more than 30 additional languages, including French, German, and Swedish. (newsroom.spotify.com) The company said listeners who used Page Match stream 55 percent more audiobook hours each week than other listeners, and 62 percent of Page Matched titles were books those users had not streamed before. Those figures point to the strategy behind the update: keep book discovery, listening, and buying inside the same app. (newsroom.spotify.com) Another feature, Audiobook Recaps, is now available on Android after launching earlier on iPhone. Spotify describes Recaps as short audio summaries tied to a listener’s last stopping point, meant to help people return to a book after a break. (newsroom.spotify.com) Spotify is also expanding its weekly Audiobook Charts to Germany after first rolling them out in the United States and United Kingdom earlier this year. In the U.S. and U.K., the company is adding a separate kids-and-family chart alongside its overall and genre rankings. (newsroom.spotify.com) The update builds on a year of broader audiobook expansion. In October 2025, Spotify said Audiobooks in Premium was available in 14 markets; six months later, that footprint has grown to 22. (newsroom.spotify.com) Spotify’s pitch is that books should work more like music and podcasts on its platform: searchable, ranked, resumable, and tied to commerce. With this week’s rollout, the company is betting that more of reading can happen inside Spotify without asking listeners to leave the app. (newsroom.spotify.com)