Spotify could soon sync audiobooks with physical ones

This Valentine’s season, Spotify is trying to arrange a meet-cute between users’ audiobook libraries and their bookshelves.

The media giant is testing a first-of-its-kind tool called Page Match that would allow users to seamlessly jump between a physical book and its audiobook counterpart, according to a new Android Authority report.

How it works

When switching from page to playback, users would scan a page of their physical book using their phone’s camera.

• Spotify would then sync the audiobook to the exact spot in the text, using optical character recognition (OCR) to read the page, identify the passage, and match it with the correct timestamp in the audiobook.
• Page Match would also allow users to jump from audiobook back to print, with Spotify showing the page where they should pick up after listening.

There is a catch…Page Match hasn’t been officially announced by Spotify. The feature was uncovered by Android Authority after the outlet did some digging through the code of Spotify’s Android app; it’s still very much in the rumor stage.

Zoom out: Audiobooks are currently the fastest-growing segment of the entire publishing industry, with annual revenues jumping by 13% to reach ~$2.2 billion in 2024.