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Comment by growt | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know a spotify-audiobook-client? What I'm thinking of is a website or app that lets you listen to audiobooks that are on spotify and saves your position per book, lets you browse and search only books without the music. I was thinking of writing something like that myself, but maybe someone already did?

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How do you find them on Spotify at the moment? Is it just by searching "audiobook" and then shifting through all the random stuff that brings up, some of which are audiobooks?

EDIT: I've just found https://community.spotify.com/t5/Content-Questions/Audiobook... which says

> In Browse > GENRES& MOODS > WORD you can now find these options.

Which should be available through their API using https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc... It's not immediately obvious how I get to the Browse section through the awful interface at https://play.spotify.com but you can jump straight to https://open.spotify.com/genre/word-page

That doesn't show a lot for me (maybe because of my country?), just some "popular" playlists. There are a lot more audiobooks on spotify. I haven't solved this when I thought about it a while back but my idea was to use some external source (like amazon) and then search for the book/author and see if I find an album with a total length that would match an audiobook.

I agree that it's missing stuff. I only had a quick glance and I could not find the Sherlock Holmes books in those playlists but the audiobooks are definitely on Spotify. I think it's a tricky problem to solve without better Spotify support.

Yes it's tricky, but that also means that there is some value in there. If someone wrote something to solve that, there is of course also the risk that spotify finally discovers audiobooks as part of their service and solves that problem for all users, making the 3rd party site/app obsolete.

Do you know if there is any open API for that? Last time I checked the API for doing pretty much anything else than play a specific song/album/playlist wasn't there. Maybe the API for books are different?

I didn't look much into the details so I might be wrong but it looked doable. Search is there, play and resume from some timepoint. So with some search "magic" to find and filter audiobooks it might be possible.

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