Spotify has officially launched Audiobooks, a potentially important addition to its offering whose name says it all: audiobooks. They currently do so, yes, only in the United States and without any plans to export to the other territories they operate in.

However, sooner or later audiobooks will arrive on this and other sides of the pond, the novelty is interesting in that it suggests a gap with respect to Spotify’s traditional subscription business model. And it’s that even though Audiobooks are an addition to Spotify’s offering, it’s not in the sense that one might expect.

Or in other words, the more than 300,000 audiobooks that are available in the Audiobook catalog – at least the vast majority – cannot be enjoyed either for free or by paying for the current subscription to the service. On the contrary, they are there to be purchased one at a time, which bookstore of your life. This is perhaps the most curious thing about this news.

So no, Spotify’s Audiobooks do not compete with Amazon’s Audible, for example.

“This is just the beginning of Spotify’s audiobook journey. We’ve worked to create a seamless audiobook experience, and we’ll continue to build and innovate on that in the future.” So all of the above could change over time, although it doesn’t look like it will at this early stage of the launch.

Spotify will see. For now, it’s just another attempt to continue monopolizing users, listeners if you will, around a solution that covers everything: music, especially concert ticketing; but also a podcast with its own monetization models and with relative results, which, however, do not reduce its prominent position in the sector.

What it will be, will be from Audiobooks, we will have to see. But break the subscription model which Spotify helped promote doesn’t seem the most attractive to a user used to it, especially when alternatives are already implemented that have been using it with reasonable success for some time.