Spotify introduced on Friday that it plans to take a position €1 million — or roughly $1.1 million — to spice up audiobook manufacturing in languages apart from English, starting with French and Dutch.
The funding signifies that Spotify is raring for extra non-English titles in its restricted library because it tries to compete with main gamers like Audible within the $8.7 billion world audiobooks market.
Adoption has been significantly gradual in France and the Netherlands, which is why Spotify is beginning with these languages.
According to the corporate, lower than 3% of French-language books are at the moment out there in audio format, with solely 20,000 audiobooks in France in comparison with about 750,000 bodily titles. In the Netherlands, round 15,000 Dutch audiobooks can be found out of a bodily library of 209,000 titles.
The firm launched its audiobook service in France and the Benelux area this previous October.
Spotify believes the gradual adoption can doubtless be attributed to excessive manufacturing prices, which can deter publishers from changing their written works into audio codecs.
Despite the corporate emphasizing its dedication to working with human narrators, Spotify just lately partnered with ElevenLabs as a cheap answer to encourage authors to publish AI-narrated content material. However, the usage of AI narration has raised considerations throughout the publishing neighborhood.
