Physical books will always have loyal fans – and rightly so – but there's a lot to be said for the audiobook. They keep you reading (or rather listening) while doing household chores, or driving, or jogging in the morning, and some of us prefer to hear words rather than read them on the page.
Even better, you can also get free audiobooks if you know where to look. Obviously, these productions take time and effort to produce, so we don't recommend obtaining them through illegal means that don't compensate the writers and production team – but these are all legitimate ways to get free audiobooks .
1. Spotify
If you didn't already know, it is true Audiobook Appreciation Month, and Spotify is celebrating with an extensive free promotion for its audiobook offering. This is possible until the end of June 2024, if you live in the US Register here for 15 hours of free audiobook listening—enough for 2-3 audiobooks. After that, you'll have to pay $9.99 per month to stay with the service.
Speaking of 30-day free trials, you can also find them at high-profile audiobook stores like Audible And B&N Audiobooks. And by the way, if you already pay for Spotify Premium for your music, you also get 15 hours of free audiobook listening, although it's not as free as your other plan.
2. Libby
If you have a standard library card, you can use it Libby to watch free audiobooks just as you would physical books, except they're delivered digitally to the device of your choice. The underlying service, Overdrivealso supports ebooks, and since tens of thousands of libraries have signed up to support the program, you can probably find one near you.
Once you've done all the necessary logins and registrations, the Libby app itself couldn't be easier to use. You can see what's popular with other users, manage borrowed books through your digital shelf, and listen to the audiobooks through a sleek and elegant player with a sleep timer and a choice of playback speed settings.
3. Open culture
Open culture is not an audiobook repository per se, but it does contain a curated list of free audiobooks you can find on the Internet. Most can be downloaded as audio files to your computer or phone and played online or offline in any app you want, although some require streaming directly from the internet and don't cost you anything.
This isn't the widest selection of audiobooks you'll ever come across, but there are plenty of classics to enjoy, including novels by Charlotte Bronte, JG Ballard, Jane Austen and Jonathan Swift. If you have time, click around the other categories on the Open Culture site as there is plenty more free material available.
4. Digital book
You can download both free audiobooks and free ebooks Digital bookand the site is super easy to navigate and explore. You can type what you're looking for into the search box, or you can dive into different genres and see what's available, or you can check out the rest of the site's community to see what's popular and trending.
The reason these audiobooks are free is that they are all in the public domain, so the emphasis is very much on old classics. For example, there are works here by Jules Verne, Emily Bronte, Arthur Conan Doyle and Mark Twain – and hours and hours of audiobooks in total, so enough material to keep your ears busy for a while.
5. LibriVox
LibriVox is another repository of public domain works that have been converted to audiobooks, and in addition to the website, there are also apps for Android And iOS available. The aim is to make all this reading accessible to as many people as possible and to this end a team of volunteers is deployed to read the literature (if you want, you can also read it once).
You won't find the latest bestsellers or celebrity voices here, but you will find a wealth of classic material – from Moby Dick to Peter Pan – and it's all very neatly organized and arranged for you to find. If you're not sure what to listen to right away, check out the genre categorizations on the web or the newly released titles listed in the apps.
