You Can Listen to Thousands of Free Public Domain Audiobooks
Audiobooks make writing more accessible to many people. Unfortunately, they can also be quite expensive. Although audiobooks can be borrowed from the public library, popular titles often have long waiting lists. Additionally, recording, editing, and publishing a single audiobook can take hundreds of hours.
To expand on current offerings, Project Gutenberg and Microsoft used neural text-to-speech technologyto create “human-quality” audio recordings of thousands of public domain books. Here’s how to find and listen to the collection.
How to access free audiobooks
First, go to the home page for The Project Gutenberg Open Collection of Audiobooks . If you’re not sure what you want to listen to, click or scroll down to ” Listen ” and then ” View Collection ” on the right. There you’ll find a list of all the audiobook titles available on the site, in (mostly) alphabetical order (there are a few titles at the very top that start with a number or punctuation mark).
If you click on a title from this list, a new tab will open and the recording will be played. You can also stream (or download) audiobooks via:
There are currently over 5,000 audiobooks available to stream or download for free, including works by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henrik Ibsen, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mark Twain, Sarah Knowles Bolton, Upton Sinclair, Mary Baker Eddy, Henry Clay, Mary Shelley. , Horatio Alger, L.M. Montgomery, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Willa Cather, Herman Melville, Isabella L. Bird, and L. Frank Baum.
The recordings are available for free as all titles are now in the public domain. Every year on January 1, a new batch of books, plays, films, scores and other materials dating back 95 years enters the public domain.