Spotify has partnered with Bookshop.org to enable listeners in the US and the UK to purchase physical books via the Spotify app, connecting audiobook discovery with physical ownership.
“We are excited to see the impact Spotify’s scale will have for local bookstores,” said Andy Hunter, Founder and CEO of Bookshop.org. “By meeting readers where they are and linking to Bookshop.org, Spotify is financially supporting indie booksellers with each purchase.”
I do not use Spotify and this news isn’t going to change that, although it may prove advantageous for Spotify users who read to have their habits consolidated on a single app. Having said, Spotify is 100% going to leverage its massive dataset of user preferences to train its own internal machine learning (artificial intelligence) models, “AI DJ” and “daylist” features, because that’s big business for ya. Monopolising music; entertainment; knowledge behind paywalls and insistent advertising is——to LIT-B——insane like social engineering obedience through convenience. Different formats for different folks, I suppose.
Musical interlude to the monotony of business politics:
Are you a Massive Attack fan? In semi-related Spotify news: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/sep/18/massive-attack-remove-music-from-spotify-to-protest-ceo-daniel-eks-investment-in-ai-military
There has been a lot of good news recently for authors, culminating in wider distribution, a softening to the stigma of independent publishing, and a bridging of physical, E-book, and audio formats through new partnerships and product innovations.
Page Match is a first-of-its-kind feature that lets readers on Spotify seamlessly switch between the printed (or e-book) and audiobook versions of a title. For perspective, Amazon has nothing like this. Read more via the provided link: Spotify Partners With Bookshop.org and Debuts Page Match Feature to Bridge Physical, E-book, and Audio Formats
Better, good news:
When you buy a book off of Bookshop.org you have the option to choose which indie bookstore you want to receive 30% of the purchase price, or let it go into a pool that is distributed among the contributing indie bookstores associated with the Bookshop.org platform. Smart networking. However, that model’s friendliness prioritised indie stores over indie authors, mostly due to stringent guidelines that prohibited indie authors (primarily in the UK) from selling their books on Bookshop.org if they were not set as returnable products. Bookshop.org’s recent partnership with Draft2Digital flips the script on that distribution formula, allowing indie authors to also profit. Way to go!
I’d better start writing. . . . Sigh . . . And I have my eye on you, Spotify!
lit-b.com 