“At Storytel, our mission is to open the doors to the magical world of stories for as many as possible. We're thrilled to introduce a suite of innovative new product features designed to significantly improve, enhance, and enrich the reading and listening experience. We believe life is better with great stories and these features will make discovering and engaging with them more intuitive and even more enjoyable. Product innovation is a key part of our strategy and this is just the opening chapter of many new and exciting updates arriving this fall”, says Johan Ståhle, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Storytel.

Read and listen at the same time with the synced listening feature
This highly anticipated and requested feature allows users to read along with the audiobook text in order to navigate, stay engaged, and quickly re-enter the context of the audiobook. With this feature, users can easily check a sentence they didn't quite hear or see how a certain name is spelled.

This is an update for anyone seeking a completely immersive reading experience, especially those with concentration difficulties or individuals learning to read or learning a new language.

Synced listening is rolling out gradually to users in Sweden on titles from selected publishers who have opted in for being a part of this launch from September 24th. The feature will expand to more users in more markets in the upcoming months.

Find the book on Storytel with Story Scan
Among the new advancements is the brand-new camera search feature, a seamless bridge between physical and digital literary worlds.

Imagine this: you're at a friend's house and a book catches your eye. You're intrigued so you want to check if it's available on Storytel. With Storytel’s new camera search Story Scan, this is made incredibly simple. Just take a photo of the book's cover with your phone, and voila – Storytel will instantly identify the title and serve you the audiobook or ebook version.

This feature is designed to eliminate friction, making it easier than ever to transition between formats and discover new stories. It's about empowering the users to engage with books on their own terms, whether they prefer the physical book or the immersive journey of an audiobook.

Story Scan is rolling out to users in all Storytel markets from September 29nd.

Partnering with Dolby Atmos to enhance the listening experience
To make the user experience even more captivating, Storytel now supports Dolby Atmos, the pioneering spatial sound experience. This will allow publishers to upload audiobooks with Dolby Atmos, offering listeners more clarity, detail, and depth for a richer listening experience. Imagine being able to hear the rustle of leaves behind you, or subtle nuances of a character's voice as if you are right there in the scene. This creates a truly multisensory experience that goes beyond traditional stereo sound and this enhancement will give Storytel subscribers an unparalleled level of immersion.

Users can expect a suite of titles with Dolby Atmos spatial sound technology to be added to the service during the fall.

Smoother search experience for all audiobooks and e-books
In October, the ability to seamlessly search within audiobooks and e-books will be introduced. This innovation is designed to bridge the current experience gap, particularly for non-fiction titles, and to facilitate a much smoother transition between different formats; physical books, e-books, and audiobooks.

With this new feature, users will no longer be limited by format when seeking information or revisiting passages. This enhanced search functionality will empower users to quickly locate and engage with the exact content they're searching for, whether they prefer to read or listen.

Rolling out to users in all Storytel markets starting at the end of October.

Improving recommendations with USBN - a new book identifier for the streaming era
ISBN, often described as a book’s social security number, has been used as the international identifier for books since the 1970s. It’s well established in the industry, but in the streaming era it creates challenges: an ISBN doesn’t show whether two titles are just different editions of the same work. As a result, if a user searches for “The Great Gatsby,” they may be served many separate versions of the same book, making discovery harder than it needs to be.

To make it easier and more enjoyable for our users to find exactly the book they're looking for, Storytel has developed USBN – a new type of identifier of audiobooks that connects different editions, formats and translations under one universal identifier. The result is an experience that significantly improves recommendations and the personalized experience for users.

USBN is designed to solve a challenge in the industry and will be implemented on all books in the Storytel catalogue starting October 20th.

See video with Storytel’s new features HERE