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Commentary<\/span><\/p>\n'Harry Potter' UK Audiobooks Narrator Stephen Fry Warns That AI Ripoff Of His Voice Is Only The Beginning<\/h3>\n<\/article>\n
Ther audiobooks effort will give Spotify Premium subscribers access to 15 hours of audiobook listening each month, with additional 10-hour re-ups available for stand-alone purchase.<\/p>\n Audiobooks can be downloaded for offline listening, with features enabling automatic bookmarking and ways to track monthly listening. Selections will be curated and suggested to users via a hub on the main Spotify page.<\/p>\n As with the music and podcast sectors, audiobooks “has one big, dominant player,” Ek said, alluding to Amazon. Taking some market share from a tech rival “gives great flexibility to our business, which will help revenue and then profit,” the exec said. “All major publishers” are on board for the initiative, he added.<\/p>\n The event in New York was also to include a panel discussion featuring Jennette McCurdy, Min Jin Lee, and Yomi Adegoke and musical performances by Joy Oladokun and Alicia Keys.<\/p>\n Adegoke said she was looking forward to returning home to the UK in order to take advantage of the new service and said her thinking has changed over the years as the medium has matured. “There’s a certain snobbery around it,” she said. While she used to view it as “cheating,” she said she now considers it “exciting” to expand the audience for books. Lee said in an environment of book banning and threats to democracy, she said it is important to open new avenues of access for authors and publishers.<\/p>\n “Someone actually came up to me yesterday and said, ‘I couldn’t make it more than halfway through your book, but when I listened to it, it flew by and I listened to the whole thing,’” McCurdy said. “I was, frankly, offended,” she laughed, “but I was thinking about it more and it made me excited to open up new ways for people to engage with books.” <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/deadline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/F4zHa2taMAYcxWh.jpeg\")
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