Whether you’re just now discovering audiobooks or have long been an audiobook enthusiast, there are lots of websites to find free audiobooks online if you carefully scour the internet. Luckily for you, I’ve done the work for you so you can just browse this list instead! You’re welcome!
This list of sources of free audiobooks online is divided up into (1) places to (legally) get free copies of general, non-public domain audiobooks and (2) sites for free public domain audiobooks.
Free General Audiobooks
Free Audiobooks for Public Domain Books
Free General Audiobooks (and Lots of Free Trials)
This section includes places to find limited selections of free audiobook as well as free audiobooks you can get by signing up for audiobook subscription trials. For the free trials, as long as you remember to cancel in time, you won’t be charged. However, these services generally require you to provide payment information when you start the trial, so just make sure you set a reminder to cancel if you’re sure you don’t want to continue your subscription.
Note that these links include affiliate links, which means The Bibliofile may receive a commission if you make purchases or sign up for the trials.
Audible Free Listens
Audible Free Listens is a limited catalogue of free downloads that Audible offers. You don’t need a subscription to download these, but you do need an Amazon.com account. You can keep these indefinitely.
Audible Stories for Kids
Audible Stories is a limited catalogue of free audiobooks that are geared toward kids. You can listen for free from your browser.
Audible 1-Month Free Trial
Audible is Amazon’s subscription audiobook service. For its 1-month free trial, it provides one free audiobook (anything in its library) for non-Prime members or two free audiobooks for Prime Members. (You also get two free audible-exclusive audiobooks, but it’s limited to a selection of 5-7 titles that they’ve chosen for that month.)
There’s no charge as long as you cancel in time and you can keep the free audiobooks in your audible account forever. Get your free trial (and free audiobooks) here.
Libro.fm 1-Month Free Trial
Libro.fm is my preferred audiobook subscription service. During the 1-month free trial, you’ll get a credit for one audiobook, which you can keep even if you cancel your subscription.
Note that you can also just put your subscription on hold indefinitely or whenever you feel like, so you can do your free trial now and just put your subscription on hold until you want to buy more audiobooks. Libro.fm offers a lot of flexibility since the credits never expire and you can stop and start your subscription really painlessly. Libro.fm purchases also support local bookstores (you can choose which participating bookstore to support)!
If you cancel or pause your subscription, you can continue to read and download whatever audiobooks are in your account, including the one you acquired during the free trial.
Kobo 1-Month Free Trial
Kobo offers a 1-month free trial which gets you one free audiobook. You can keep the audiobook if you cancel.
Audiobooks.com 1-month Free Trial
For the Audiobooks.com free trial, you’ll get one free “premium” audiobook (which is basically a normal audiobook) and two free “VIP” audiobooks (which is a audiobook.com-specific audiobook). The “premium” audiobook is the one that will be for titles that you’ve heard of. If you can cancel your subscription, you keep the “premium” audiobook, but lose access to the “VIP” audiobooks (but those are probably titles you’ve never heard of anyway).
Cancel before it renews otherwise it will automatically renew.
Scribd 30-Day Free Trial
Scribd lets you read an “unlimited” amount of books (there’s actually an unstated limit, but odds are you don’t hit up against them) during their trial, but you don’t get to keep any of the books when it’s over.
Libby Audiobooks (from your Local Public Library)
So, you’ll need a library card from your local public library in order to get access to these, but Libby connects with public library systems in order to provide online access to audiobooks. Note that you can only access audiobooks that are associated with your specific library. Check on their website to see if your library is included, and if it is, you can browse their catalogue from the comfort of your home!
Google Play Free Audiobooks
Google Play offers a variety of general (but kind of random) and public domain audiobooks for free! It’s not a great selection, but it’s worth browsing through at least if you don’t mind some pretty random titles.
Free Public Domain Audiobooks
Librivox
Librivox is a pretty cool project where volunteers read and record audiobooks for others to enjoy. Note that it’s limited to books that are in the public domain. If you want to, you can even contribute your
own recording of a public domain book!
Spotify Audiobooks
Spotify offers a small catalogue of free audiobooks for public domain books. You can find the full catalogue on this playlist. Or, preview it here:
Project Gutenberg Audiobooks
Most people know that Project Gutenberg has been fantastic for distributing public domain books, but you might not know that they’ve also got a fairly extensive catalogue of audiobooks, too. These are limited to public domain books and include both human-read and computer-generated (read by a computerized voice) audiobooks.
Under their filters, you can filter out the human vs computer-generated ones, if you prefer one type over the other.
The Internet Archive Audiobooks
The Internet Archive (you might know them from the Wayback Machine which caches webpages) includes copies of audiobooks drawn from other public domain sources such as the Naropa Poetics Audio Archive, LibriVox, Project Gutenberg, and Maria Lectrix. It also includes contributions from Internet Archive users.
Loyal Books
Loyal Books is a site solely dedicated to audiobooks for public domain books.
DigitalBook.io
DigitalBook offers a clean, user-friendly layout for navigating audiobooks from public domain books. It seems to be mostly content from Gutenberg and Librivox (as of January 2021), but if you don’t like design of those websites, you might find this site easier to navigate.
Lit2Go
Lit2Go focuses on audiobooks for children’s literature, but they use this term pretty broadly, since it includes a lot of classics like Dickens and Mark Twain, etc. Definitely worth browsing through, even if you are not solely interested in children’s literature.
StoryNory
StoryNory is a site for audiobooks of public domain children’s stories. Great if you’re looking for fairytales and children’s classics.
Do you have another site to suggest? Drop a comment below! Happy audiobook-listening!
This is a fantastic compilation of the many audiobook resources! Thank you for compiling it. :D I personally enjoy Kobo audio, Libro.fm and Libby.
To add to the list that I enjoy utilizing is a library app called cloudLibrary, though it’s been brought to attention that not as many libraries are on there quite yet. Another audiobook site that is well-liked is Hoopla.