New Spotify feature connects audiobooks to physical books

Despite a tough January involving price hikes and a surge in AI-generated music, Spotify may be developing a useful new feature.

Android Authority, which analyzed code strings within the Spotify app, reported that the music streaming service is working on an audiobook feature called “Page Match.”

This intuitive feature would allow a user to simply scan a page of a physical book with their phone camera. Using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, the app would scan the text, find the corresponding timestamp in the audiobook, and automatically sync the playback to that exact point.

Currently, no information exists regarding when or if Spotify will make this feature available to users.

That sounds great, but even more usefully, reports suggest it works in reverse as well. You could use Page Match to locate the page in the physical copy that corresponds to what you hear in the audiobook.

In other words, you can switch back and forth between a physical book and an audiobook as you wish, provided you own (or have otherwise acquired) a physical copy and have access to the audiobook on Spotify.

Spotify appears to be developing “Page Match,” which, as Android Authority noted, would represent a novel concept for audiobook streaming. Currently, Amazon provides a similar sync service, but it only functions between Audible and Kindle versions of books.

Spotify, however, seems to have designed Page Match to work with any physical book a user owns. While we do not know when or if this feature will launch, its presence in Spotify’s code suggests a potential release sooner rather than later.