Spotify comes up with a clever way to sync audio and print books ↦

The Verge’s Terrence O’Brien details Spotify’s solution for helping you jump between audio and print books:

Point your camera at a page, and the Spotify app uses computer vision to match text with audio. If you have to jump behind the wheel for a long drive, but didn’t want to put down The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, you can just snap a pic to jump to the spot in the audiobook where you left off in the physical book.

It works in reverse too, apparently. Point your camera at your physical book and it’ll tell you whether to flip back or forth to reach the spot you left off in your audiobook. (Spotify also today announced that it will partner with Bookshop.org to sell physical copies of its audiobooks.)

It’s a clever workaround, and has me wondering if a similar system could provide a workaround for the lack of sync on other hardware, like the Xteink X4.

That said, it does not escape me that this particular workaround is something that we end up with largely because of the imposition of Digital Rights Management on ebooks. In an ideal world, you’d simply be able to pick up any device—audio, ebook, etc.—and just keep reading where you left off.

While I don’t expect the current situation to change anytime soon, there are occasional glimmers of hope. Amazon, for example, now lets customers download DRM-free ebooks (when publishers have made them available).

I’ve argued before that Apple pushing for a world of DRM-free ebooks—the same way it once did for music—could make the company more relevant in the market once again. But it’s done vanishingly little with its ebook marketplace in recent years, and nothing on the horizon suggests anything different to come.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.