Only days after Spotify announced its foray into physical book sales, which included an audiobook feature that lets you sync your listening and your offline reading progress, Amazon-owned Audible has launched a feature that brings e-books together with audiobooks.
The company announced on Wednesday an “immersion reading” feature in the Audible app, which allows readers who have both the e-book and audiobook versions of a title in their Audible and Kindle libraries to read the e-book’s text while the audio plays. The feature also lets users switch between the different formats across devices. While in the “Read & Listen” mode, the text of the book is highlighted in real time in sync with the narration.
The Kindle app already offered a tool that would allow readers to move between the Audible version and the e-book, when both versions had been purchased. This feature is now coming to Audible’s app for the first time. Customers will need to own both versions of the book for this to work, but discounted audiobooks will be made available to customers who own the matching e-book, the company says.
At launch, hundreds of thousands of titles will be supported by the new “Read & Listen” feature, including those in English, German, Spanish, Italian, and French. Initially, the option will be offered in the U.S., with the U.K., Australia, and Germany gaining support over the next few months.
To discover eligible titles, Audible will automatically identify which Kindle e-books have audiobook matches within its app.
Of course, many customers were already reading and listening to their books without buying two versions — by having Alexa narrate their e-books from their Kindle library. Alexa is not a professional narrator by any means, and the AI assistant’s more monotonous delivery can lead you to zone out. By offering a way to add on the audiobook for a lower price when you’ve already bought the e-book, Amazon hopes to boost book sales across formats.
The company also claims that the combination of reading and listening can improve focus and comprehension, according to industry research and its own internal data. In addition, customers who read and listen are the most engaged, consuming nearly twice as much content per month as audiobook-only customers, Audible noted.
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