Spotify announced On Friday, it plans to invest 1 million euros – or around 1.1 million dollars – to increase the production of audiobook in languages other than English, starting from French and Dutch.
The investment indicates that Spotify willingly more non -English titles in a limited library, because it is trying to compete with the main players such as Audible in $ 8.7 billion global audiobook market.
Adoption was particularly slow in France and the Netherlands, which is why Spotify begins with these languages.
According to the company, less than 3% of French books are currently available in audio format, with only 20,000 audiobooks in France compared to about 750,000 physical titles. In the Netherlands, about 15,000 Dutch audiobooks are available from the physical library of 209,000 titles.
Business fired Audiobook Service in France and the Benelux region in October last year.
Spotify believes that a slow reception can probably be attributed to high production costs, which can stop publishers from transforming their written work into audio formats.
Despite the fact that the company emphasizes its involvement in working with human narrators, Spotify recently collaborated with Elevenlabs as a profitable solution encouraging authors to publish professional content. However, the use of AI narrative raised concerns in the publishing community.
