Audiobooks are a great way to “read” when you’re not able to read for real. However, if you switch between audio and text, you know how annoying it can be to sync your progress—especially across different mediums. Spotify is working on a clever solution.
This isn’t so much of a problem if your listening and reading happen within a closed ecosystem. Audible and Kindle work seamlessly together with Amazon’s Whispersync feature, for example. But it’s hard to replicate that system if you don’t use the same provider for audiobooks and e-books. Or, more importantly, physical books. That’s the problem Spotify is looking to solve.
A recent look into the Spotify app for Android revealed that a new feature called “Page Match” is tucked away in the latest beta. It’s one of those “why has no one thought of this yet?” ideas. The code suggests that you’ll be able to simply point your phone’s camera at a physical book page, and the app will use optical character recognition to scan the text and sync your audiobook to that exact moment.
While Amazon’s solution is definitely more hands-off, it only works in the digital realm. Whispersync is useless if you prefer to read physical books. What’s also interesting is that it sounds like Page Match will work in reverse as well. Spotify may show the page number of the physical book when you stop listening.
One thing I’m curious about is whether Page Match could work with eReaders, too. If you already pay for Spotify Premium, you might not want to pay for an Audible subscription on top of it. Will Spotify be able to detect a page in a book on an e-ink screen? That would be pretty handy.
Of course, as anyone who collects books knows, page numbers are not consistent across different editions and publishers. Something as simple as font size or margins will completely throw off page numbers. The app reportedly asks you to scan a nearby page if it gets confused.
As with any unannounced feature, there’s no guarantee that Page Match will see the light of day. However, it does seem to be fairly far along, and this is a market that Spotify has been trying to break into. I would expect to see this launch sometime this year.
Source: Android Authority
How to Get the Most Out of Audiobooks on Spotify
Spotify’s audiobooks have many things to offer in terms of catalog and features. If you want to get started with listening, there are some features that you can use to make sure you’re getting the most out of these audiobooks.
