Audible Launches Immersion Reading for Deeper Kindle Integration

Amazon has long offered Audible and Kindle integration features that let you mix reading via audiobooks and eBooks. But now it’s offering a new immersion reading experience that takes this integration even further.

“Audiobooks count as reading,” Audible chief product officer Andy Tsao says. “But now at Audible, you can read with your eyes too. Read & Listen gives book lovers the best of both worlds. Whether you’re learning a new language, studying for school, or lost in a story’s world, you no longer have to choose one format over the other.”

Immersion reading in the Audible app allows customers who have the audiobook and eBook versions of a book in their Audible and Kindle libraries to follow along with synchronized, highlighted text, delivering what Audible says is “a seamless, best-in-class experience.” It claims, further, that one can improve focus and comprehension by listening and reading at the same time. And more cynically, that customers who do this are “among Audible’s most engaged users, consuming nearly twice as much content per month as audiobook-only customers.” So that probably explains this more than anything.

According to Audible, there are hundreds of thousands of compatible titles available at launch across English, German, Spanish, Italian and French. This feature is now rolling out to customers in the United States, and UK, Australia, and Germany are coming soon.

Compatible titles are automatically identified for you, including those you already have in your Audible and Kindle libraries. And this change won’t impact royalty payments to publishers and authors.