Beginning today, Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant users in the U.S.and Canada will be able to download a free “Stephen King Library” onto their smart speaker platforms, Simon & Schuster has announced. The library will recommend King books tailored to users’ reading tastes from a selection of 56 books by King.
S&S is billing the “Stephen King Library” as perhaps "the first voice-activated book recommendation tool dedicated to an author’s body of work from a major publisher." The library was jointly produced by King’s longtime publisher Scribner, S&S, and Simon & Schuster Audio, and was developed by Skilled Creative.
“Simon & Schuster intends to be at the forefront of utilizing voice interaction technology to connect books and authors to readers and audiobook listeners,” S&S executive v-p and chief marketing officer Liz Perl said in a statement. “Using A.I. through Stephen King Library is a fun and innovative experience for exploring this master storyteller’s work.”
The program, S&S said, will ask users a series of situational questions—voiced by audiobook narrator Jeremy Bobb—and suggest a reading list informed by their responses. In-app purchases are not yet available, but consumers can buy the books from their platform’s retail store shopping carts.
A demonstration for Amazon Alexa users is available here and a demonstration for Google Assistant users is available here.
The S&S deal follows by a couple of week, Hachette Book Group's agreement with Amazon to partner on creating content for Alexa and the Echo Dot Kids Edition, a children's version of the voice-controlled digital assistant.
