Spotify dropped major lore during its annual Investor Day presentations on May 21 indicating that the big bets the platform placed on books are paying off.

Most notable is the revelation that nearly half of Spotify’s audiobook consumers, many of whom had never tried the format before audiobooks were included in Spotify Premium, just started listening within the last year.

What’s next? Spotify will build on the success of Audiobooks+ with new tiers offering even more listening hours and will introduce Family and Student plans later this year. — RJS

It’s got to be a good sign for books and reading that so many of the season’s biggest movies are based on books, and not just that: they all look really good!

Let’s check out the highlight reel:

🎧 Hear the details about these and more summer adaptations on the Book Riot Podcast.

100,000+ audiobooks. $8.25 a month.

ElevenReader gives you more listening than Spotify Premium at a fraction of what Audible costs. Enjoy 20 hours a month of bestsellers, hidden gems, and guilty pleasures, plus sleep timers, background soundscapes that actually match the mood, and the ability to turn your unread articles and documents into audio so you can finally clear the backlog.

Start with 10 free hours when you search ElevenReader in the app store or visit their website.

The Book Riot Crew has been hard at work, and we’ve got something absolutely fire to show for it: We’ve launched our Group Membership feature for All Access! *cue the horns*

Now, bookish groups—like libraries, book clubs, and more—can get in on the goodies All Access membership has to offer, but at the discounted rate of $5/month per member. 

With a membership, group members can:

Starting a group membership is easy. To join:

By 1926, Agatha Christie had already published five mysteries and one collection of short stories. So when The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was published that summer, readers expected to read a great Agatha Christie book. They got that, and more.

I am not going to tell you what it is about. I will say that it is the third of Christie’s novels to feature Hercule Poirot and that there is a murder (and that another character in the book is often considered the progenitor of Miss Marple herself).

If you have not read it yet, it’s worth going into pretty cold, except to know that a) the British Crime Writers Association named it the greatest mystery novel of all time in 2013, and b) it made some people pretty cranky.

Your hint as to why it ticked some readers off is best given by pointing to Ronald Knox’s “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” which he created in 1929 in response to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd‘s supposed violation of one of the rules, which of course didn’t exist in 1926 when the book was published. Anyway. For my part, Ronald Knox was a stick in the mud and Ackroyd rules. — JO

100,000+ audiobooks. $8.25 a month.

ElevenReader gives you more listening than Spotify Premium at a fraction of what Audible costs. Enjoy 20 hours a month of bestsellers, hidden gems, and guilty pleasures, plus sleep timers, background soundscapes that actually match the mood, and the ability to turn your unread articles and documents into audio so you can finally clear the backlog.

Start with 10 free hours when you search ElevenReader in the app store or visit their website.

Three exciting releases from authors you know and love are new at Libro.fm this month. There’s a revenge thriller from the author of The Housemaid, a standalone dystopian sci-fi novel from the author of Jade City, and a magical, time-traveling love story set in the world of The Midnight Library. Fire up the app!

Sharon Blackie is the author of Ripening: Why Women Need Fairy Tales Now, out June 2nd from September Publishing. Below, she discusses three pieces of fairy-tale advice that are relevant to modern life.

In Ripening, I argue that fairytales show us how to survive—maybe even thrive—in challenging times, because every fairytale heroine’s journey begins with catastrophe snapping at her heels. Encoded within these beautiful old stories is information about the behaviours and qualities of character that help us find a way through. Here are three fairytales which offer such advice.

Trust your instincts and you won’t be eaten

In the Slavic fairytale “Vasilisa the Beautiful,” our heroine, given the opportunity to question the fearsome witch Baba Yaga, instinctively intuits that she shouldn’t ask about the three pairs of disembodied hands which appear in Baba’s kitchen each night to take away the fruits of Vasilisa’s work. Her intuition saves her, as Baba Yaga confirms: “It’s a very good thing that you didn’t ask about things here inside my house. I don’t like people to tell stories about me, and I eat up those who are too curious.”

Be generous, even when you’re lost and afraid

The heroine of the German story “Frau Holle,” lost and alone in an otherworld at the bottom of a well, responds to the pleas of some burning loaves to remove them from their oven, then cheerfully stops to pick the heavy crop of apples weighing an old tree down. So the magical old Frau Holle rewards her with a shower of gold—while rewarding her sister, who refuses to help in any way, with a shower of tar.

Show hospitality to unexpected guests

The mother in the Grimms’ story “Snow-White and Rose-Red” bravely welcomes in an enormous, exhausted bear who shows up at her cottage door one night. She feeds the fearsome bear and lets him warm himself by the fire, so teaching her daughters both that hospitality is a sacred duty, and that the wild Other isn’t always to be feared. (The bear, inevitably, turns out to be a handsome prince who marries one sister, then arranges for his brother to marry the other.)

100,000+ audiobooks. $8.25 a month.

ElevenReader gives you more listening than Spotify Premium at a fraction of what Audible costs. Enjoy 20 hours a month of bestsellers, hidden gems, and guilty pleasures, plus sleep timers, background soundscapes that actually match the mood, and the ability to turn your unread articles and documents into audio so you can finally clear the backlog.

Start with 10 free hours when you search ElevenReader in the app store or visit their website.

Did you know? Ian Fleming named his new spy character James Bond after American ornithologist, James Bond. This is not because Fleming had some personal attachment to Bond, but because his original conception of the character was an extremely average person to whom extraordinary things happened, and James Bond was the most boring name he could imagine.

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🤬 Spice up your group chat with some ragebait lit.

🐝 Tune in to the Scripps Spelling Bee.

👀 Peep the eye-popping info that’s conspicuously absent from one of the year’s buzziest memoirs.

👻 Add some new queer horror to your Pride Month TBR.

Written by Rebecca Schinsky, Jeff O’Neal, Vanessa Diaz, Erica Ezeifedi, and Danika Ellis. Thanks to Vanessa Diaz for copy editing.

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