Spotify is looking to take a huge chunk out of Audible’s Australian marketshare with the launch of its Premium Audiobooks offering today.
A catalogue of 150,000 audiobooks are now available as part of the existing Spotify Premium subscription tier. Subscribers can listen to up to 15 hours of audiobooks per month, with the ability to purchase ten-hour top-ups.
Audiobooks can be download for offline listening, there’s a handy automatic bookmarking feature and — most crucially for those bed-time readers — you can set a ‘Sleep Timer’ to avoid chewing up those listening hours while you are sleeping.
The company is also claiming that, with this launch, they have the largest locally-available catalogue of any subscription-based audiobook streaming platform currently on the market, with “70% recent bestselling titles from around the world from top publishers including Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and RB Media, as well as independent publishers like Dreamscape and Pushkin.”
Premium subscriber will notice an audiobook hub on the app, which will feature curated suggestions.