Spotify has recently introduced Audiobooks for its Premium subscribers in the UK and Australia, offering them the opportunity to indulge in up to 15 hours of audiobook content each month. The service will soon extend to the US market as well.

Here are several worldwide audiobook trends that prompted Spotify to introduce audiobooks to their platform.

1. Audiobooks have emerged as the most rapidly expanding sector in the realm of book publishing. According to the Audio Publishers Association (APA), revenue from audiobooks in the United States showed a 10% rise in 2022, resulting in an annual sales figure of $1.8 billion.

2. In recent years, China's audiobook industry has been experiencing consistent double-digit growth. In 2022, the market had expanded to a value of 7.2 billion Yuan.

3. The audiobook industry in Europe surpasses $850 million in value and is projected to experience an annual growth rate of 18.6% until the year 2025..

4. The worldwide audiobook industry currently exceeds $5.3 billion and is anticipated to grow to $35 billion by 2030. This indicates an annual growth rate of 26.4% for audiobooks over the next seven years, contrasting sharply with the book publishing market, which is expected to expand by just 1.9% annually.

With these global trends, the opportunity to scale in local language space is exponential and we launched KReader MVP on 27th of September 2023(Kudos to KReader Core Team, who made this a reality with many long hours), a subscription based digital reading framework for local languages (Sinhala and Tamil) in Sri Lanka with eBooks, Human Narrated Audiobooks and AI powered speech synthesis to batch process human-sounded Audiobooks with emotions for local languages. (Audiobooks will soon be enabled in the platform)