YouTube Premium Could Get Its Best Perk Yet, As Long As It Doesn't Pull A Spotify

Audiobooks might be the next big thing to land on YouTube. Google has reportedly been talking with publishers about officially bringing audiobooks to the platform sometime in 2027, and the best part is that Premium subscribers might not have to spend anything extra to listen to them.

YouTube Music and Premium already reach more than 125 million people between them, giving publishers a huge audience to tap into on day one. While YouTube hasn't confirmed the report just yet, I can't help but be excited about the possibilities here. As someone who reads a lot and listens to audiobooks regularly, being able to listen to them as part of a subscription I'm already paying for would be a nice change. Not only that, but it would also help make the YouTube Premium price hike we saw back in April 2026 much easier to stomach.

But if YouTube isn't careful, it could fall into the same trap that Spotify has. Because while you can listen to some audiobooks on Spotify, the perk comes with a monthly time limit. If YouTube copies that idea, it will lose a lot of the appeal — especially if you like to listen to audiobooks often.

Audiobooks already exist on YouTube, just not in any official way. All you really need to do to find one is head to the site or open the app and search up a well-known title, then you can usually find some variation of that book being read in audio form. Now, whether it's the official audio files or a fan-made one is another question altogether — but these videos do exist, and they are often not officially licensed by the publisher.

We don't know yet how Google plans to set this up, either. The company could easily do something where Premium only covers listening to certain books, with everything else for sale individually. This is similar to how Audible already operates, so it would put YouTube in a pretty solid place to be a true competitor. It is also possible that YouTube could do something similar to what it has for movies, where you can purchase individual titles. This would make it more akin to what Google already does with Google Play Books.

For comparison, Audible's Premium membership runs $14.95 a month and comes with one credit for that same time period, plus a catalog of thousands of titles you can stream or download without spending it. So even offering something on par with that would help set up YouTube Premium as a true Audible competitor. Several cheaper alternatives to Audible already exist, too, but audiobooks plus ad-free videos and YouTube Music for roughly the cost of one Audible credit could be a very enticing offer.

What Google needs to avoid, though, is falling into the same pitfall as Spotify Premium. Plans that include audiobook access on Spotify are limited to just 15 hours of audiobook listening per month. When your included playtime runs dry, you either have to wait for the next cycle to start or pay for more hours to keep listening.

While 15 hours might be fine for some titles, longer novels — like epic fantasy books — are going to run upward of several months' worth of listening time. One of my favorite books, Brandon Sanderson's "The Way of Kings," is 45 hours and 30 minutes on its own. So you'd need to use more than three months of Spotify's included listening time if you wanted to listen to it all the way through. And listening at 2x speed won't save you here, either, as Spotify only counts the time at normal speed. Splitting a plan with family is its own problem, too, as people on Family and Duo plans will only be able to take advantage of the listening time if they are the plan manager.

Don't get me wrong, I have no delusions that publishers are going to license their books for free. So it is very likely that YouTube ends up with some kind of limit. Or, perhaps Google will be able to finally give us a true competitor to Audible by offering a library with unlimited listening. Depending on how much you listen, audiobook subscriptions are still worth it, and that could be even more true if YouTube plays its cards right.