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Wired Editor Chris Anderson has had a great influence on Spotify. His first book, The Long Tail, has been required reading in our office since day one and today we’re extremely excited to be working with him to bring another first to Spotify.
Starting today Chris’ new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, will be made available to all UK users.
Personally narrated by Anderson, Free considers a brave new world where the old economic certainties are being challenged by a growing flood of free goods – newspapers, DVDs, T-shirts, phones, even holiday flights. The audiobook supports today’s hardback launch of Free, published by Random House.
This is the first audiobook we’ve ever included in our catalogue. We’re going to trial it, see what people think and who knows, maybe this is the start of something new for us…
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Please fix so us swedish can listen to it too.
Why isn't this available in the Netherlands?
Only UK? Come´on, made it open at least to premium users :p
Do you know when it will be available outside UK?
What about Sweden :(
Only in the UK? C´mon!!
This is absolutly great! I love the idea of listening to audio books on spotify. Just make sure there's some easy way of continuing where you stopped last time and you don't lose track if you decide to listen to some music inbetween. But what a hot first release by you guys this is fantastic. Bring it to Sweden a.s.a.p :)
Ah, but it's not the first audiobook, now is it? Check out spotify:artist:6Qzo2f66FRLTlQzP7QsJcZ:popular-tracks. There's probably more.
I would say that there's a lot of focus going on towards the UK market from the Spotify offices at the moment. I can understand why but it doesn't make me like it any more...
And here is another audiobook, Dracula in German (yay): spotify:album:2UEIeVePwGPuf6XXH1EWE3 Is Free different somehow?
I love it. Great book! Please create a genre search tag: genre:audiobook. And maybe just have the "Albums" as results.
I'd love to see more audiobooks, speeches and lectures on Spotify.
Why oh why is it only available in the UK?
Actually, this is not the first audio book on Spotify. There are several norwegian audio books in your catalogue already, and I've listened to a few of them.
Would love to listen to this from Spain... Who should I ask this?
It's great news indeed, but I must join the growing crowd of users asking why this is not available outside the UK. Today's world economy is more and more global-scale, and services like Spotify do benefit from this nature. Then, why does Spotify need to restrict content in this way? Has it got anything to do with the book's rights in other countries? Once the book is out in digital format, someone will probably grab a copy of it somehow and post it somewhere else, where the rest of the world can access it. I think it would be much better, both for the users and Spotify, to let all the global audience listen to it through this service. Same thing goes for certain releases of new records that are available only in certain countries. Maybe I'm demographically not significant, but I'm sure there's plenty of people everywhere that are interested in listening to things that are not available in their home countries otherwise. I'm fed up with the offer in record stores, radio stations, etc., and I discovered with great pleasure that I could maybe rely on this service for music of the mainstream. But if Spotify also raises walls and customizes its offer to me based on my country of residence, it surely gives me reasons not to pay for it, and probably move on to some other service. In any case, I think that overall Spotify is a great idea, and great execution too, but please do think twice about some of these issues. Greetings from Spain!
Now, come on! I think Spotify as a company should try to work against region restrictions. This is why Bob the millionaire became a pirate: http://eirikso.com/2005/06/06/how-bob-the-millionaire-became-a-pirate/
I love how I got an advert for Nokia comes with music half way through the book where it says "Nothing is ever for free. Right?" Loving it. Keep doing this sort of stuff.
will the thing after that be stand-up? or is that a thing allready passed and not fully put in?
Some of the chapter names that are spoken dont match the names shown on the screen. Number 6 says "Information wants to be free" but the start of the track says "Too cheap to be free", which is track 5.
Fix the copyrights and make this available for Swedish users, how about now? :)
Great if audio books will be available on Spotify, if and when Spotify becomes mobile it’s a great benefit to the concept.
Great idea and a great book. As others have said bring this to the mobile market and it will really kick off =]
http://open.spotify.com/artist/3WrFJ7ztbogyGnTHbHJFl2 Another audiobook
Audiobook? Keep the focus on the music!
This is a great idea, I hope you continue with it
Excellent, audio-books is the next step in spotify's evolution in my opinion. Please add fantasy and/or sci-fi books as well (like David Eddings books, or Ashimov). That would be awesome.
Awesome, love audio books, take a look at librivox - they have free audio books you could work with?
I really enjoyed the book and think it is a great idea to offer audiobooks on Spotify. If you do offer audiobooks in the future you should give them a section rather than treating them like albums. In a business point of view you are more likely to listen to an audiobook longer which means there will be ads.
Hmm... Time to start developing Bookify?
"will the thing after that be stand-up? or is that a thing allready passed and not fully put in?" Spotify already has some stand-up albums. Mitch Hedberg, Demetri Martin and Denis Leary all have albums on Spotify.
Fantastic idea! Love Chris Anderson, and can't wait to give his book a listen! Let's get more audiobooks on Spotify!
Yep, I'm all for more audiobooks on Spotify. Good work well done.
I would like to see more audio books too :) ps. Spotify is almost too good to be true
This is so great, more please!
great! love it! this is my first audio book and i thought i would hate it because its weird to hear someone speak to you, but it's actually very interesting and i hope to see more of these audio books on spotify! thanks!
Finnish users or at least premium users want access to this as well!
Yes, we all wan't access to everything the other countries have. I don't think its spotify's fault that there are regions etc, they have nothing to gain from regions and so on. If you think this is all stupid, you should contact the EU and have them end this madness. In this case it is most likely something that the publisher is behind. Keep up the good work spotify!
Great idea. I'm really getting into Spotify. More audiobooks would be cool.
Cool! But why only to UK users? Give all users access!
Weird having regional restrictions on this one since it's now available as text for free. http://www.scribd.com/doc/17135767/FREE-by-Chris-Anderson Maybe it's some sort of controlled test, like "we only release it in uk and then do a survey of uk users". Still stupid though.
I love the idea of audio books. Not being a big reader myself audio books are a great way to enjoy some great works. Theres a huge world of audio books out there so time to start adding more I say!!
Was thinking about this a while back, that it would be a terrific service to offer audio books via Spotify. I do hope you make a stab at further developing this area.
moooore! Moooooore! Keep 'em comin'!
...and how can it not be available everywhere? It's ....free!
I'd imagine that any region restrictions are down to label or royalty issues. Spotify could have clarified that. Just listened to the whole thing while rearranging furniture (and then while playing Spider Solitaire!), interesting stuff. I love non-fiction, but I lack focus and it takes me forever to get through it. Apparently not if it's being read to me by the author! One thing I'd like to know though: was it abridged, or was it a reading of the full text of the book?
Ok, kind of disappointed now - the version on Spotify is the abridged 3 hour one. The unabridged 6 hour version can be downloaded from the author's website for free, presumably without adverts! http://bit.ly/RulP3 Oddly he charges $7.49 for the shorter version that's on Spotify and nothing for the longer version, reportedly because it's the best bits and saves you time. I wonder how much he would charge for saving three further hours and not listening to the thing at all!
To be clear, regional restrictions are not something we like and we don’t add them ourselves. It’s simply that we could not get the rights for the audio book outside of the UK at this time. We always try to get content with no restrictions but that’s not always possible.
Thanks guys!
There's also at least one Swedish audiobook available: spotify:album:7J4mWRMb0BY6LVUGKLhtzg :)