The music streaming platform Spotify announced on Monday the launch in France and the Benelux countries of an audio book listening offer, with major French publishing groups as partners. This service offers 15,000 titles in French and in total more than 200.000 titresmainly in English.
In France, Spotify competes with Amazon Audible and two other Swedes, Storytel and Nextory. The Swedish giant is already present in a French-speaking market, Canada, where according to it the growth in listening to books in French has been very rapid since the launch in April. “This trend should be confirmed with the arrival of the service in France and other Western European countries,” he said in a press release.
Its advantage is to offer its “premium” subscribers (11.12 euros per month for the individual plan), or around 246 million subscribers, who come for music and podcasts, 12 hours of audiobook listening per month. Where this service already exists, most Spotify subscribers are content with it, with the average book listening time being five hours. If they want more listening hours, they can purchase them extra.
“I think the market in France has yet to even appreciate its full potential,” explains David Kaefer, who heads the audiobook division within Spotify. Hachette Livre (via its subsidiary Audiolib), Editis (Lizzie) and Madrigall will supply books, under undisclosed commercial conditions.
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