On this episode of Self-Publishing with ALLi, Dan Holloway reports on Spotify's investor day, where the company credited its Page Match feature for a 60 percent rise in audiobook listening hours, notes ElevenLabs' quiet expansion as a listening platform in its own right, and examines a troubling trend in AI copyright class actions — where increasingly narrow eligibility requirements around ISBN registration and Copyright Office filings are leaving many indie and overseas authors out of the picture.
Listen to the Podcast: Spotify Reports 60% Audiobook Growth
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About the Host
Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.
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Read the Transcript
Dan Holloway: Hello and welcome to another Self-Publishing News podcast. We start this week with lots of audio news. Audiobooks have been back in the news a great deal of late, and the two companies that have been driving those headlines are in the news again this week. We start with Spotify, and the large reason Spotify has been so prominent recently is their investor day on May 21st — the annual event where they tell people what they've been up to and what their plans are for the coming year.
The headline figure from the audiobook world: Spotify claims a 60% rise in listening hours for audiobooks in 2025. That's a big deal. Audiobook growth in general has been running at around the 10% mark for some time, and Spotify, while not brand new to the audiobook space — they launched in 2022 — is still a relatively recent entrant. Sixty percent growth is quite significant.
One of the reasons they give for this is really interesting: their Page Match feature. Page Match, as you may remember, lets you read the same book across multiple formats if you own each one. It's a copyright-friendly pick-up-where-you-left-off feature that works across formats. So you might be reading your physical book on the bus, then when you start walking from the bus stop to work you switch to the audiobook, then back to the physical book while you wait for your coffee. It does this through features including taking a photo of where you are in the physical book, which it then matches to the equivalent point in the audiobook. To quote Spotify directly: ‘We've seen an uplift in listening of up to 55% over a month when readers use Page Match, helping listeners finish books twice as fast.' They describe that as a win for audiences and authors alike. I had wondered about the utility of Page Match when I first read about it, but it seems that whether I could see it or not, a lot of readers can, and it is driving people to read and listen more — which is indeed good for authors.
One more note from Spotify's coming-year plans: they're adding their Audiobooks Plus program to family and duo plans, meaning everyone on those plans will be able to purchase additional credits through Audiobooks Plus. The clear direction here is not so much trying to reach entirely new listeners as trying to get more out of the listeners they already have.
ElevenLabs Is Also a Listening Platform — and Growing Fast
Spotify brings us to a new story involving their latest partner. We heard recently that Spotify has launched a major partnership with ElevenLabs, allowing authors to create audiobooks directly within Spotify using ElevenLabs software — no separate ElevenLabs account required. But this is a reminder that ElevenLabs is also a listening platform in its own right. They have ElevenReader, which offers two plans: a ten-hours-a-month free tier (free for now, at least), and an Ultra all-you-can-listen package.
ElevenLabs pays creators in a very ElevenLabs fashion: if someone listens to a book for 11 minutes or more, you receive $1.10 per reader engagement. Everything is done in multiples of eleven, which is an interesting gimmick. They have also just added another 200,000 human-narrated titles — they are keen to stress human-narrated, not AI-generated — to their catalog through a deal with Penguin Random House. So while partnering with Spotify, ElevenLabs is clearly also going on a competitive push to establish itself as a destination of choice for listeners. For authors creating audiobooks through ElevenLabs, that is another potential platform where listeners might find your work.
AI Copyright Class Actions: What Do Indie Authors Need to Know?
And that brings us to our final story, which arises from the various AI copyright legal cases making their way through the courts. This comes from a really interesting piece in Writer Beware looking at both the Anthropic case and a more recent case against Meta. It asks the question we've all been asking ourselves: what do you actually have to do to be part of a class in an AI copyright class action?
In the Anthropic case, the class was defined as rights holders who had registered their copyright with the US Copyright Office in a timely fashion, and the class was restricted to titles that had either an ISBN or an Amazon ASIN. So it did cover Kindle books and digital-only titles where an author had an Amazon number but no ISBN — but copyright registration was required. That caused significant pushback. You'll remember one of the objectors at the Anthropic fairness hearing pointed out that this requirement had reduced the number of eligible titles from around seven million down to roughly half a million, excluding a large number of indie authors and overseas-based authors.
The Meta case being reported on now has gone even further. In this case, the parties bringing the class action — who are publishers, with the exception of author Scott Turow — are seeking the class to be restricted not only to titles registered with the Copyright Office, but specifically to titles that have an ISBN, or for journal articles an ISSN. That would exclude anything that only has an ASIN — so anything exclusively on Kindle, and many digital titles where authors have not purchased ISBNs, would be left out entirely.
There is interesting speculation in the piece about what impact this might have on indie authors. Will we be buying more ISBNs and attaching them to all our ebooks going forward? I am not a lawyer, but it feels to me that the horse may have bolted for this particular case — timeliness matters, and judges care about whether you registered your copyright and obtained your identifiers before a certain date. But people may well start buying ISBNs and attaching them to their books with an eye on future cases. It will be very interesting to see whether that happens and what effect it has on the scale of those cases.
To be clear: this is not legal advice, it is simply reporting. What it does suggest is that the number of titles eligible for these cases is not necessarily growing as we see more cases filed — and there may be judges and lawyers who are either unaware of the impact on indie authors or who are deliberately excluding certain types of title. As indie authors, we are over-represented in the category of people whose books may not be registered with the Copyright Office, or exist only with an ASIN. Very much watch this space, and I will of course report on any further cases and how classes are defined in future.
With that I'm going to count myself lucky — I'm in the middle of thunderstorms and have somehow managed to get through this without thunder and lightning doing frightening things to my internet connection. I will speak to you again at the same time next week. Thank you.
