New reported Spotify feature syncs audiobooks to physical books

January hasn't been great for Spotify due to price changes and the scourge of AI-generated music, but the music streaming service might have at least one neat new feature in the works.

Android Authority reported, based on some strings of code in the Spotify app, that a new audiobook feature called Page Match is in the works. The idea is simple and seemingly very intuitive: You just use your phone camera to scan a page in a physical copy of a book, and Spotify then syncs the audiobook in its app to that page. This works using optical character recognition (or OCR) technology to scan the text of the page and find the corresponding timestamp in the audiobook. Unfortunately, there's no word on when or if this feature will roll out to users.

That sounds great, but where things get even more useful is that it apparently works in reverse, too. You'll apparently be able to use Page Match to find the page in the physical copy that corresponds to what you're hearing in an audiobook. In other words, you'll be able to go back and forth between a physical book and an audiobook as you see fit, provided you actually own (or have otherwise acquired) a physical copy and have access to the audiobook on Spotify.

As Android Authority pointed out, this would be pretty novel (pun intended) in the world of audiobook streaming. Amazon offers a sync service that only works between Audible and Kindle copies of books, but Spotify's Page Match feature sounds like it works with just any physical book you've got lying around. Again, we don't know exactly when, or if, this is coming, but given that references to it are already appearing in Spotify code, hopefully it's sooner rather than later.