Where and How to Find Free Audiobooks
Listening to audiobooks seems to be one of the solutions to high efficiency, whether you are on the subway, cleaning or cooking, you can listen to audiobooks. The eye and the ear do their duty in separate.
While the total volume of audiobooks is still small compared to hardcover books, it’s fair to say that audiobooks have helped U.S. publishers recover some of their losses in recent years. With the blooming of smart assistant like Amazon Alexa, the audiobooks are taking more market shares.
The benefits of listening to audiobooks are obvious. One is to protect your eyesight. I began to listen to audiobooks two years ago, still keep the habit of “listening to books” during commuting time. In my opinion, this kind of reading mode is quite innovative, and no harm to eyes.
Like movies, music, and eBooks, we also need to pay for audiobooks. To save money, we need to know some tricks to find free audiobooks.
Free Classical and Public Domain audiobooks
What is public domain? According to Wikipedia:
The public domain consists of all the creative works to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable.
Therefore, most of the public domain audiobooks are free to download.
Below are some trusted websites to download free classical and public domain audiobooks:
| Website | Description |
|---|---|
| https://www.digitalbook.io | In fact it's a search engine for eBooks and audiobooks, you can download free audiobooks from different sources |
| https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/ | This website mainly provides free stories and poems in MP3 format. |
| http://www.loyalbooks.com/ | All audiobooks are public domain and you can download for free. |
| http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/1 | A house-hold name for public domain books, now they are also providing public domain audiobooks, clicking the link you can get human-read audiobooks, there are also computer-generated audiobooks. |
| https://librivox.org/ | All audiobooks are free to download, if you like, you can volunteer to read books for them. |
| https://www.learnoutloud.com/Free-Audiobooks | This is also actually a search engine, it collects audiobooks from LibriVox, Spotify, Youtube, and so on. |
| http://www.openculture.com/freeaudiobooks | This page collects 900 free audiobooks for downloading. Including fiction, poetry and non-fiction. |
| http://thoughtaudio.com/ | The website offers free public domain audiobooks and philosophy audiobooks. |
Find free audiobooks if you are Amazon Prime Member
At first, we need to know that Amazon doesn’t put all free audiobook in a page or category, I believe most of Prime members don’t know how to find them. Below are the steps about how to get them for free.
Notice, they are more than public domain audiobooks, you can get them for free because you are Prime member. You can keep each book for one month for free, so you are borrowing them in actual, instead of owning them. However, if you are not able to finish an audiobook in one month, you can borrow it again when it is returned.
- Be sure you are an Amazon Prime member, if not, you can sign up here.
- Visit this page, it collects books with Audible narration in Prime reading.
- Choose the audiobook you want to borrow.
- Borrow the eBook edition at first.
- Then you can borrow the audiobook edition. In most cases, you are not able to see the audiobook free borrow option if you don’t borrow an eBook edition.
If you are not an Amazon Prime member, but an Amazon Unlimited member, you can also borrow books for free on this page.
Paid audiobooks subscription services worth the price
Although there are many free audiobooks you can get, most of them are classical public domain books. However, the amount is limited. Most of best sellers are paid books.
There are some subscription services which provides best sellers for free, you only need to pay a monthly fee, then you can get a certain number of audiobooks for free each month. Below are some audiobooks subscription services worth the price.
Audible
In audible.com you can listen to thousands of audiobooks on your mobile phone as well as in the desktop. You can enjoy your favorite books anywhere and anytime. Audible audiobooks are compatible with the iOS devices including Apple iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, Android devices, Sonos and Alexa embed devices.
You can start your 30 days free trial and get 1 audiobook and 2 audible originals for free. After trial period subscribes audible with $14.95 per month and you can cancel the subscription anytime if you don’t want it.
Scribd
Open an account on Scribd and enjoy unlimited stories, books, audiobooks, magazines and many reading materials.
Scribd magazine keeps you updated with current trends of the world, books give you the opportunity to learn a specific topic, you can also read lots of literature here. Of course, there are tons of audiobooks available here.
Before subscribing to a membership, you can make the most of the free trial period to get the best user experience. After completing a trial period, you can enjoy books, audiobooks, magazines, and more only for $8.99 per month.
Audiobooks.com
Get more than 125,000 audiobooks here. Browse as many as books you want to read, filter books with the genre-wise function and browse author list to get your favorite author books. Also, apps for Android and iOS devices are also available. More than 1 Million downloads of Audiobooks is completing and still counting.
Join audiobooks.com and get a first free book to read. And after it, you can start subscribing Audiobook with $14.95 per month.
