For many years, Amazon ran the audiobook marketplace Audible as a stand-alone business, unaffiliated with the larger objectives of the company. That is likely to change a little with the introduction of a test today that will let Audible customers get suggestions for what to listen to next depending on how they watch Prime Video.
This will be unveiled via a new discovery page feature dubbed “Based on what you watched recently on Prime Video,” the business claims. Audible customers will get a customized choice of relevant books in this suggestion carousel.
The functionality is currently in a test phase, so there isn’t an explicit opt-in or opt-out. Instead, according to Amazon, the suggested carousel will appear in the app for half of customers who have both Audible and Amazon Prime.
The recommendations themselves use collaborative filtering to suggest more relevant audiobooks to readers based on what they are seeing on Prime Video and what other users just like them have listened to. According to Amazon, these suggestions might include books, plots, microgenres, and authors that prior customers with similar tastes have liked.
Audible claims that past customer behavior motivated the function. When novels became TV series or motion pictures, Audible would experience a spike in listenership for the original content. For example, in the two weeks following the 2022 Prime Video debut of “Reacher,” author Lee Child’s catalog’s average daily listening minutes increased by over 80%. Two weeks after “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” author Jenny Han’s catalog’s average listening minutes increased by more than ten times. Additionally, there were 2.5x and 4.3x boosts for other titles, including “Daisy Jones & The Six” and “Red, White, and Royal Blue.”
But given that Spotify has recently added 15 hours of audiobooks to its Premium membership in certain areas, with the ability to top up minutes as required, we believe it’s more likely a reaction to at last having some competition in the audiobook business. Thanks to this change, Spotify now ranks second in audiobooks, behind Audible. The streaming music provider may also make recommendations using its own client data. Britney Spears’ autobiography, for example, would have recommended a pop music lover. But since they are often book adaptations, TV series and movies are a more potent source of suggestions.
The relationship between Audible and Amazon has deepened in recent months; for example, the company’s audiobooks are now part of Amazon’s “Your Books” tracker. Currently, it generates suggestions using data from Amazon.
“We see that clearly in how our customers engage with content on Audible, and there is a natural synergy between TV, movies, and books,” said Andy Tsao, chief product and analytics officer at Audible, in an interview with Eltrys. “We are always innovating to deliver on what our customers want, and we’re excited about the potential of this feature to help our listeners discover new stories and worlds as well as go deeper into the ones they love in other media.”
