Spotify Page Match sounds perfect if you can’t get enough of your favourite book
Spotify is working on a new Page Match feature that'll pick up where you put the book down. It'll be a nice option for those like to read and listen to their books.
Spotify is working on a unique new feature that would aid audiobook streamers who also like to consume books the old-fashioned way with a physical paper copy in their hands.
The in-development Page Match feature – spied within the Spotify app code by Android Authority – will make it possible for avid readers to pop down the book on the coach, and pop in the headphones and pick up exactly where they left off as they set about their day.
The new feature will simply require users to scan the physical page within the book, using the smartphone’s camera, with Spotify taking them to the exact same page in the audiobook. Amazon has done this in the past, but for ebooks from the Kindle Store, combined with the Audible streaming service. But this is the first time we’ve seen a version using physical books.
It’s quite a simple but genius feature, which uses optical character recognition to identify where the reader is, and will begin playing content from there. The report was also able to glean that the feature works in reverse, taking listeners back to the analog reading experience seamlessly.
“Based on the string below, we think Spotify will tell you the exact page in a book that corresponds to your current audiobook position,” the report says.
The string: <string name="page_match_button_text_with_pagenumber">Page %1$s</string>
It seems it would be quite simple for Spotify to greet the pausing of the audio by announcing the page number, or at least showing it on the display, for users who’ve opted-in to the feature As the report points out, it sounds like a neat feature for book clubs where different people are consuming the text in different ways.
Audiobooks on Spotify are still a relatively new benefit. Premium subscribers get 10 hours of audiobook listening per month at no extra cost. They can also buy additional credits if they wish to listen more. For those who love to curl up in bed with a good book, the new page match feature might be a way to get to the meaty parts of the story a little faster and enjoy more books.
Chris Smith
