Spotify has quietly entered the market for audiobooks and is now offering 9 titles for free through its mobile and web apps.
I can’t find an official announcement, but the new titles include:
Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — and get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift!
"*" indicates required fields
In case it’s not obvious, all of those books are in the public domain, which suggests that this is only a test to see how Spotify’s subscribers will react to the new feature. But each recording is new and exclusive to Spotify. And the service has also launched a new podcast called Sitting with the Classics on Spotify, in which Harvard professor Glenda Carpio discusses each of the titles separately.
The move comes in the wake of Spotify’s expansion into podcasts and, it should be noted, Audible’s own move into podcasting. For now, the audiobooks are free to all Spotify users, not just paying subscribers.