Spotify is giving subscribers hours of free audiobooks

Spotify is seriously getting into audiobooks, now offering Premium subscribers 15 hours of listening per month with access to more than 150,000 reads.

The new feature, also available for plan managers of Family and Duo accounts, is now available in the UK and Australia. The US will be next, following later in the year.

Readers can access audiobooks within the Premium catalog, which Spotify says includes "upwards of 70% of bestselling books." The catalog has integrated books from major publishing houses like Hachette, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster. Hachette, for instance, is placing over 7,000 titles on Spotify, while HarperCollins and Penguin Random House have provided their entire audio collection to the platform.

After the initial 15-hour listening period is over, Spotify users can buy top-ups to continue listening to books. The average audiobook is thought to take between eight and 12 hours of listening.

"So [listeners] might focus on one title and finish it, or have ten books open and make their way through all of them slowly. That flexibility is a real benefit of our product," said Owen Smith, Spotify’s Head of Audiobooks Product and Tech.

Spotify has made a slow and steady bid to make their platform "the seamless one-stop destination for all things audio." Their foray into the podcast space has faced some recent hurdles, but they continue to partner with major voices and creators.

Last year, Spotify announced their launch of 300,000 audiobook titles available for purchase. CEO Daniel Ek projected that the industry could be worth $70 billion, saying: "We believe that audiobooks, in their many different forms, will be a massive opportunity. And just as we’ve done in podcasting, expect us to play to win."

This latest move – to integrate audiobooks into the subscription model – makes their place in the audiobook space far more concrete. It also makes it a distinct competitor of Amazon's Audible, the leader in this market which uses a credit system instead.