Will Spotify ever have lossless audiobooks?

Spotify made a big deal about the inclusion of lossless music a couple of months ago, but this format did not include digital audiobooks. Spotify offers lossless audio (HiFi) for music to Premium subscribers. With Lossless, you can now stream tracks in up to 24-bit/44.1 kHz FLAC, unlocking greater detail across nearly every song available on Spotify. So you can enjoy new releases and your favourite tracks, in the highest quality, while being immersed in the music. Overever, this feature does not apply to audiobooks or podcasts; they still stream at standard quality, typically 320 kbps AAC. Audible doesn’t offer true lossless audio; their standard is compressed AAX (around 32-128 kbps). Still, you can get higher quality by setting the app to “High” quality in settings, which uses better compression. They now offer Dolby Atmos for immersive spatial audio on compatible devices. Apple’s lossless audio (ALAC) for music offers CD-quality (24-bit/48kHz) and Hi-Res Lossless (24-bit/192kHz) for Apple Music subscribers, but for audiobooks within Apple Books, It’s generally compressed AAC or MP3, with newer titles offering better quality than older ones, though not true lossless like Apple Music; you enable it in Music Settings, requiring wired headphones or external DACs for Hi-Res, and the icon appears on content available in lossless. Google does not offer audiobooks for purchase or streaming in a lossless audio format to general consumers. The platform primarily focuses on standard, compressed formats optimized for streaming and file size, not high-fidelity archival quality. While Google’s publishing platform accepts lossless files (like FLAC and WAV) from publishers for submission, these files are then encoded to M4A or MP3 formats for distribution to end users, typically around 96-128 kbps. Spotify makes a big deal of digital audiobooks and is always introducing new features and expanding internationally. In November, Spotify released an AI-powered recap feature for audiobooks, letting users catch up on a story to the point where they stopped listening. Users will see a recap button at the top of the audiobook’s page that plays a summary of the story so far. Spotify said the recaps will appear after users have listened to 15-20 minutes of a book and will be regularly updated as they progress. It added that Spotify isn’t using audiobook content to train models, and that recaps don’t replicate the original narration. Earlier in the year, they launched a multi-tiered Audiobooks+ subscription service in several countries. Michael Kozlowski has written about audiobooks, e-books and e-readers for the past eighteen years. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

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