With limited time on our hands and endless book recommendations out there, audiobooks are becoming the new craze for avid readers. Audiobooks continue to allow bookworms the ability to read while doing all kinds of everyday tasks! For those who don’t like reading, but still want to gain value from books, audiobooks are great options! In this article, we’ll share some of the best places to find free audiobooks. By leveraging books within the public domain, specials, and free trials, you should have plenty to keep you entertained for a while!
It’s a great time to be alive as a book junkie when you have all of these awesome free audiobooks at your fingertips! Here are the top 25 places to find free audiobooks online!
1) Galatea
Galatea is one of the newer audiobook apps that’s taking the industry by storm with its unique pricing model and immersive reading experience. Rather than the typical monthly subscription fee that’s seen on many other apps, Galatea has “…each story broken into a series of 10-minute episodes, and users will receive one episode for free each day. If they want more, they’ll pay with in-app purchases of points they can spend – 40 points cost $1.99, while 250 points cost $9.99,” according to Forbes. The short story is that you can leverage the free stuff a LOT with this app! Beyond its unique pricing model, the app focuses on creating an immersive reading experience, allowing you to read or listen to books, as well as hear sound effects and vibrations throughout the stories. Additionally, there is offline reading available and dark mode! The Galatea app is available on both Google Play and Apple stores.
2) Ubook
Ubook is a mobile application that houses around 300,000 audiobook titles for you to listen to for free. The mobile app is available on both Android and IOS, and most of the catalog consists of titles by major publishers. There are thousands of bestsellers in English and other languages, classics, novels, fiction, self-help and more. Also available are series, documentaries and podcasts, as well as foreign content in Portuguese, Spanish, French, German and Italian.
3) LibriVox
This platform comes with 50,000 downloadable classics. The audiobooks on Librivox are all read by volunteers, which makes the audio very unique compared to other audiobook platforms. In fact, if you’re interested in contributing audio for a particular book, feel free to do so! If you’re just looking to listen, however, you can browse by author, title, subject, and language to filter for available audiobooks. This database of audiobooks is completely free with no catches, so enjoy!
4) Hoopla
Thanks to the participation of public libraries, Hoopla is yet another great place to access approximately a million free audiobook titles and ebooks online! Access to all the content on Hoopla is free, but you’ll have to create an account. Accessing a title is very similar to the traditional library model where you’ll digitally “borrow” a book for a period of time.Titles will vary based on the participating library catalogs. Also, like a library checkout, the books you borrow on the platform will eventually expire so that another user can access it.
5) Lit2Go
This website offers a collection of audiobooks that are within the public domain. Lit2Go is a free online collection of stories and poems in Mp3 (audiobook) format. An abstract, citation, playing time, and word count are given for each of the passages on the website. Each reading passage can also be downloaded as a PDF and printed for use as a read-along or as supplemental reading material for your classroom. You’ll find a lot of classic literature on this site more than you’ll find anything contemporary, but it’s a great place to find freebies!
6) Audiobooks.com
Who doesn’t like to leverage freebies on a free trial now and again? If you’re looking to grab a few recently released audiobook titles, you can get 3 free ones using the free trial at Audiobooks.com. The Audiobooks.com site owns a catalog of 350,000+ premium titles, plus they have sleep and meditation resources too (who doesn’t need a little extra sleep and meditation, right?). Some of the titles you can find on this website include Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, Fairytale by Stephen King, and Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover.
7) BBC Sounds
This platform is unique because it not only has a large collection of shows you can listen to live and recorded, but it also has a large selection of abridged or shortened audiobooks. I recommend the History of Wine read by Julian Curry for a quick background on a globally popular beverage (something I love sipping with a good book). It is totally free to make a BBC Sounds account to access music, radio shows, podcasts, and a growing collection of audiobooks.
8) Rakuten Kobo
Rakuten Kobo embodies everything you love about your favorite local bookshop, perfected for your modern life. Their mission is to bring the power of reading to your world via audiobooks — because they’re booklovers, just like you. With this audiobook provider, you get your first book free when you start a new account. Plus, they have a loyalty system that will reward you based on how much you read! Some of the featured novels on the platform are The Christie Affair by Nina de Gramont, It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover, and Finding Me by Viola Davis.
9) Spotify
The streaming group, Spotify, has over 3,000 audiobooks you can listen to for free, including favorites like The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, Love and Misadventure by Lang Leav, and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The company plans to expand its audiobook collection even more, making it the third pillar of the business. To find the audiobooks, just visit the Audiobooks artist page on the streaming platform to find free audio books to listen to. The playlists are a great way to browse for something new, or you can just search for your favorite author to see if audio recordings of their works are available. You can start listening to audiobooks with Spotify’s free plan, as long as you’re okay with hearing some ads now and again.
10) Audible
Audible is a membership service that provides customers with the world’s largest selection of audiobooks as well as podcasts, exclusive originals and more. Though Audible is a premium membership service, you can still access books for free by going to their Free Listens page, which will also include podcasts available for free listening. This page is somewhat limited, though, as far as options go. If you’re interested in getting specific audiobooks for free, you can leverage the 30-day free trial with Audible to get one free book of your choice. If you already have an Amazon Prime membership you actually are already eligible to get two free book credits per month! The book options are essentially limitless through Audible’s catalog with options like Selma Blair’s reading of The Diary of Anne Frank, which she was given the Award for Best Spoken Word Album.
11) Overdrive
Overdrive is very similar to Hoopla in that it also collaborates with the extensive book catalogs of libraries to generate its collection of audiobooks. The company recently acquired its competitor in the industry called RBDigital back in 2020, which means they have recently grown in the amount of titles they offer. These are totally free and there is no limit on how many library cards you can have. Overdrive is partnered with several library reading mobile apps as well, which certainly makes reading on the go much easier! You can check out Overdrive’s collection of titles here. You can also download their mobile app called Libby.
12) Open Culture
Open Culture positions itself as “the best culture and educational media on the web” by cultivating an extremely vast list of free resources across the internet. Not only do they offer links out to free courses, textbooks, and certificate programs, but they also offer 1,000 free classic audiobook titles as well! If you’re a lover of the classics, you’ll definitely want to check this resource out! Something to keep in mind, however, is that some of the links to resources may no longer be available. As we did a little digging throughout the site, we definitely clicked on resources that had expired.
13) Learn Out Loud
This website is a database of free educational multimedia. It has over 3,000 free audiobooks, plus speeches, lectures, and more. If you’re looking for audiobook freebies, you should definitely check out the free audiobooks, podcasts, and educational content on Learn Out Loud! The website is quite dated, but you at least don’t need an account to browse.
14) Scribl
Scribl is an audiobook and ebook online retailer that’s certainly worth checking out! Not all of their titles are listed for free, but they have quite a large free collection available, which is definitely worth your time. Scribl also has a mobile app available, and they also encourage independent authors to upload and sell books on the platform as well.
15) Audiobooks Now
Audiobooks Now is a web and mobile application that provides digital books and audiobooks for a monthly subscription just like Audible. They make their membership feel more like a book club, and they offer tons of deep discounts and rewards to members. Their subscriptions also don’t have any commitments. What’s even better is that they have a free audiobook section with over 1,300 pages of titles to browse, which is drastically more extensive than the lackluster free selection provided by Audible.
16) Scribd
Scribd offers millions of audiobooks and ebooks on their mobile app, which is available for both Android and IOS users. If you’re looking to get something free, you can do so by starting a 1-month trial. After that, you’ll have to start paying monthly. Something that makes this platform unique is that they also offer sheet music for the musicians out there.
17) Storynory
This website is geared toward kids with tons of fairy tales, educational content, and full audiobooks available. The little ones are bound to find something they love on Storynory! The only qualm we have is that the website could use a bit of an update, and there is a lot of content that you can get lost in if you’re not careful!
18) Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is one of the oldest digital libraries that’s run by dedicated volunteers. It’s completely free to use. Yup! There’s no fee for registration and no special apps are needed to access the content. The website offers over 60,000 free ebooks and audiobooks just begging for eager little readers like you! If you find Project Gutenberg useful, the team does ask that you at least consider a small donation to help with their mission in digitizing more books.
19) Internet Archive
Internet Archive is another online nonprofit collection of free ebooks available by registering on their website. Something to note about this resource is that it’s quite dated, and a lot of the titles are very old. We couldn’t find much in the way of popular or contemporary content, but if you’re into the random and obscure, this is right up your alley! Something noteworthy we did find were plenty of classic titles, but those are also something that can be found on many of the other resources listed in this article.
20) Audiobooks HQ
Audiobook HQ is an IOS-only mobile application that offers audiobook streaming right from your mobile device. Audiobooks HQ doesn’t mess with confusing credit systems or have a monthly subscription cost, plus you don’t have to fuss with annoying in-app purchase connections either. AudioBooksHQ lets you download and listen on demand, wherever you are, whenever you’re ready. Even find the top rated books with the click of a button, or switch the language and get your Spanish on!
21) All You Can Books
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again! We’re not above leveraging free trials when we can. If you’re looking to get in a little free reading via audiobooks, then you can use the free trial with All You Can Books. This service is available on both Android and IOS devices, and the 30-day trail claims to have no limits. One thing to note is that the selections are dated, so they don’t have much in the way of hot new releases. Also, other users have said that connecting with support isn’t very easy.
22) FreeClassicAudiobooks.com
Whether you’re an educator or a passionate writer, there’s always something that can be learned from classic literature. This website offers tons of classic literature that’s digitally narrated and available for download. You can find titles such as Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, and Treasure Island by R. L. Stevenson.
23) DigitalBook.io
DigitalBook.io offers free public domain audiobooks and ebooks to its users. You can explore 100,000 Kindle books, ebooks, and audiobooks using their free digital bookshelves. DigitalBook.io leverages a powerful custom search and curation functionality on their web application that pulls books from all the heavy hitter sources like Librivox, Gutenberg, and more! You can also explore their free books and listen to clips without having to login or create an account.
24) Google Play Audiobooks
This is definitely not our absolute favorite place to find audiobooks, but we’re here to give you options. Google Play certainly offers millions of titles, but the free list options are not as vast as we would have hoped. When it comes to the freebies, you’ll find a lot of romance fiction. Regardless, there’s freebies to be found there!
25) Pocket FM
Pocket FM always has new podcasts and books. The app is free and comes with a selection of free listens with in-app purchases. When you download the app, it will have you choose if you prefer content with a male or female lead. High quality audio compliments the editing and storytelling, making the listening experience out of this world.
Lucky to have The Monroe Theater Guild in her Wisconsin hometown, Eleanor began acting at a young age and fell in love with art. She later got her BFA in creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She continues to hone her skills in writing and acting, honoring a legacy of playwrights and directors on each side of her family by participating in theater. She believes in the power of art to heal, and the ability words have to move others, so she continues to write plays and nonfiction geared toward progress. Eleanor is passionate about collaborating with artists and helping others explore their creativity. You can find more of her work in The Things and Atlantis Magazine.
