YouTube wants to be the place consumers go when they want to discover their next page-turner. After breaking into categories like music and podcasting, YouTube is now planning to add an audiobook offering to its Premium tier, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
WSJ claimed that YouTube has been in active discussions with publishers, with plans to launch its expanded audiobook library in 2027. YouTube has not confirmed the WSJ report.
The audiobook could be tied into YouTube Premium, the ad-free tier that costs $15.99 per month for new customers. That subscription has already been linked to YouTube Music, with the two services combining to reach more than 125 million customers. Alternatively, YouTube could make audiobooks available for a la carte purchases.
Though audiobooks are typically associated with platforms like Audible and Spotify, there are plenty of narrated tales available for free on YouTube. Some authors, like Dean Koontz, have made audiobook versions of their titles available on their official channels. In other cases, third-party channels upload unauthorized audiobooks. Some YouTube versions of public domain works, like Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, have received millions of views.
Even if YouTube’s audiobook archive is already thriving, there are plenty of good reasons for the platform to offer a more official version of its digital library. Long-form listening sessions can deliver the extended watch time YouTube loves to brag about at industry presentations. And the Google-owned hub has long-standing ties to the literary world; its creator community has helped publishers sell physical copies of their titles, and that trend has continued even after the rise of #BookTok. Why not enlist that community to sell audiobooks, too?
Ultimately, audiobooks give YouTube another opportunity to embrace one of Spotify’s top formats and bring it to a global, engaged community. YouTube has already become a top choice for podcast consumption, and there’s no reason why it can’t achieve similar gains in the world of audiobooks.
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