Just in case you own the book and subscribe to Spotify Premium, the music streaming giant is adding a feature called “Page Match.” It’s essentially Google Lens for finding your place in the audiobook using a picture of your actual book.
It’s not such a crazy idea. If you subscribe to Spotify Premium, you get 15 hours of listening time per month for any audiobook the company has on file. For those who have an Audiobook+ subscription, listening time is doubled to 30. For many, though, the option to pick up a digital book recording and listen is there, and it can be useful when you need to drop the physical copy to run an errand or do something else.
Spotify’s new feature called “Page Match” is supposed to help with that. Using your phone’s camera, Spotify can determine what timestamp in the audiobook you’re at using text recognition. Once scanned, the option to play the audiobook from that exact spot in your copy will appear.
Spotify says Page Match works the other way around, too. When you want to go from audiobook to book again, you can scan your book for a sort of “hot or cold” game with the app. It will tell you whether to flip forward or backward, depending on where you stopped listening.
Premium members can use this feature with any book. As mentioned, Spotify’s basic subscription allows for a certain listening allotment, while the company’s Audiobook+ plan brings that total to 30 hours. Page Match will also be available for free users, given they’ve purchased the audiobook individually.
The feature will roll out alongside a symbiotic partnership between Spotify and Bookshop.org that lets users purchase physical books through independent shops in the US and UK. Users will be able to buy books through the Spotify app, which will help “support those bookshops and the authors who brought that story to life.”
Spotify says Page Match will be available “by the end of February,” while the physical purchase option will launch “later this spring.”
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