Storytel signs audiobooks partnership with Spotify, shares jump

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) -Swedish audiobook streaming group Storytel has partnered with Spotify to allow its subscribers to listen to its library of audiobooks on Spotify from later this year, sending its shares up 12%.

Storytel offers listening and reading of more than 500,000 titles across 25 markets and competes with the likes of Amazon's Audible.

"We think this is a great partnership and a way to get access to more potential audiobook listeners around the world," CEO Jonas Tellander told Reuters. "We are growing at about 30% annually and we are hoping that this will contribute a lot to that."

Spotify recently tied up with Facebook to allow listeners to play music and podcasts directly from the social network's iOS and Android apps.

Storytel has books in 30 languages but is restricted to the country a subscriber is in and the kind of credit cards they use. Spotify is available in more than 150 countries and have 356 million total monthly active users.

Storytel, which has roughly 1.6 million subscribers, is working to make its books available in different countries as it has worldwide rights for most of the audiobooks in several languages, Tellander said.

However, to access the audiobooks, Spotify subscribers would still need a Storytel subscription.

(Reporting by Supantha Mukherjee, European Technology & Telecoms Correspondent, based in Stockholm; editing by Niklas Pollard)

By Supantha Mukherjee