5 Places to Listen to Free Audiobooks

Print books will always have their loyal fans—and rightly so—but audiobooks have a lot going for them, too. They allow you to read (or rather, listen) while you do housework, drive, or go for a morning jog, and some of us just prefer hearing words spoken to reading them on the page.

Even better, you can get free audiobooks too if you know where to look. Of course, producing these books is time-consuming and laborious, and so we wouldn’t recommend acquiring them through illegal means where the authors and production team aren’t compensated. But these are all legitimate ways to get free audiobooks.

1. Spotify

In case you didn’t know, it’s Audiobook Appreciation Month, and Spotify is celebrating with an extended free promotion on its audiobook offerings. Until the end of June 2024, you can sign up here for 15 hours of free audiobook listening if you live in the US—enough for 2-3 audiobooks. After that, you’ll have to pay $9.99 per month to stay on the service.

Speaking of 30-day free trials, these are also available from well-known audiobook providers such as Audible and B&N Audiobooks. And by the way, if you already pay for your music with Spotify Premium, 15 hours of free audiobook listening is also included – although it’s not so much free as it is included in your other subscription.

2. Libby

If you have a regular library card, Libby lets you borrow free audiobooks just like you would print books—only they’re delivered digitally to your device of choice. The underlying service, OverDrive, also supports e-books, and since tens of thousands of libraries support the program, you’re likely to find one near you.

Once you’ve completed all the necessary logins and registrations, using the Libby app itself couldn’t be easier. You can browse what’s popular with other users, manage borrowed books through your digital shelf, and listen to the audiobooks through a clean and sleek player that features a sleep timer and a choice of playback speed settings.

3. Open culture

Open Culture is not an audiobook archive as such, but it does offer a curated list of free audiobooks that you can find on the internet. Most of these can be downloaded as audio files to your computer or phone to play online or offline in any app. However, some are to be streamed directly from the internet and you don’t have to pay for them.

While this isn’t the largest selection of audiobooks you’ll ever find, there are plenty of classics here to enjoy, including novels by Charlotte Bronte, JG Ballard, Jane Austen, and Jonathan Swift. If you have time, browse through the other categories on the Open Culture site, as there’s plenty more free material available there.

4. Digital book

You can get both free audiobooks and free ebooks from Digital Book and the site is very easy to navigate and explore. You can either 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 what’s popular and trending with the rest of the site’s community.

The reason these audiobooks are free is because they’re all in the public domain, so they’re heavily weighted towards old classics. There’s work by Jules Verne, Emily Bronte, Arthur Conan Doyle and Mark Twain, for example – and hours of audiobooks in total, so plenty of material to keep your ears busy for a while.

5. LibriVox

LibriVox is another archive of public domain works converted into audiobooks. In addition to the website, there are also apps for Android and iOS. The goal is to make this reading accessible to as many people as possible. To this end, the literature is read aloud by a team of volunteers (you can also read aloud yourself if you want).

While you won’t find the latest bestsellers or celebrity voices here, you will find a wealth of classical music – from Moby Dick to Peter Pan – and it’s all very neatly organized and laid out to help you find it. If you’re not sure what you want to listen to right away, check out the genre categorizations on the web or the newly released titles listed in the apps.