Spotify Premium users in the U.S. and U.K. will soon be able to purchase physical books through its new affiliate partnership with Bookshop.org. The affiliate links will appear on the Spotify app, and Bookshop.org will handle pricing, inventory, and fulfillment.
“There’s trend of immersion reading where you're listening to the audiobook at the same time as reading the print book, and for those people we think this is a great service,” Owen Smith, VP of audiobooks and partnerships at Spotify, told PW. “But not just for those people, but for anyone who discovers a new book on Spotify—and that’s a lot of people—and then want to go ahead and buy the print copy.”
Bookshop.org CEO Andy Hunter said that the partnership has the potential to expose an entirely new customer base to the book buying platform. “Spotify has upwards of 100 million users around the world each day, so we can’t help but expect some will be new to us,” he noted. “We will have to wait and see, but this could be something very impactful in the long run.”
Purchases are accounted for as in a typical Bookshop.org affiliate link deal, with 10% of the purchase price going back to Spotify and Bookshop.org pooling a portion of the sale to return to independent bookstores.
Concurrent with this news came the launch of Spotify’s Page Match, a new service that allows readers to sync their audiobook listening and print reading. Users of the Spotify app will be able to take a picture of a page in a print book using their cell phone camera, allowing users to either sync their audiobook to the photographed page or be guided to the page in the book that corresponds with where they left off in their audiobook.
“We think this is a first-of-its-kind technology,” Smith said. “It helps readers move between formats like never before.”
