Feb 5 (Reuters) – Spotify said on Thursday it would begin selling physical books on its streaming platform through a partnership with online retailer Bookshop.org, marking an unexpected expansion beyond its audiobooks business. The company is doubling down on new features to better compete with rival streaming services from tech giants such as Apple and Amazon. Since launching audiobooks two years ago, Audiobooks in Premium has expanded to 22 global markets and its English-language catalog has grown to more than 500,000 titles, Spotify said. Its new listeners were up 36% from a year earlier and listening hours grew 37%, it added. Spotify said the physical book purchasing feature will begin rolling out later this spring for users in the U.S. and the UK, with Bookshop.org handling pricing, inventory and fulfillment. Spotify will receive an affiliate fee for purchases made inside its app. The company's move comes at a time when physical book sales are sluggish because more users are increasingly turning to e-books and other sources on the internet. News Corp, which owns HarperCollins, said last year that book publishing orders were slowing from both readers and retailers. Baker & Taylor, a nearly 200-year-old library book distributor, also shut down operations in January. Spotify said it would launch "Page Match," a tool designed to let users scan a page from a physical book or e-book in the Spotify app to jump to the matching point in the audiobook. Page Match will be available at launch on most English-language titles, with plans to be fully rolled out to all audiobook users by February 23, the company said. Spotify has also increased the price of its monthly premium subscription plan by $1 to $12.99 in the U.S., Estonia and Latvia markets. Shares of the company were down 4.5%. The stock rose nearly 30% last year. (Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel)
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