Free audiobooks for iPhone

Aloud puts more than 125,000 free audiobooks on your phone. Not a trial, not three-a-month, not a credit system — free because the books themselves are free.

How can they be free?

Because copyright expires. Once it does, a book enters the public domain and anyone can read it, print it or record it without asking permission or paying a fee. That covers most of the literary canon written before the 1930s — thousands of the books people actually mean when they say “the classics”.

Aloud draws on three catalogues that guarantee public domain status at the source: Project Gutenberg (79,000+ proofread texts), LibriVox (20,000+ volunteer human recordings) and Open Library. Nothing comes from anywhere with murkier rights. The long version is here.

Two ways a book gets read to you

• A real human recording. If a LibriVox volunteer has read the book, you get their recording — actual voice, actual person.
• A voice generated on your iPhone. If nobody has recorded it, your phone narrates it. The synthesis runs on the device, so it works offline, uses no server, and there is no cap on how long you listen.

Some of what is in there

…and roughly a hundred and twenty-five thousand more.

Your own books too

Aloud reads DRM-free EPUB files you already own. Drop one in and it gets the same treatment as everything else — chapters, position tracking, and a voice reading it aloud. Your library is never uploaded anywhere.

What it costs

Aloud has a subscription, and it also has a one-time price: pay once and keep it, with no renewal. Either way there is no listening limit, because the narration happens on your phone rather than on a server that would need paying for every month. Here is the reasoning.

See Aloud →

Common questions

Is this legal?

Yes. Every title comes from a catalogue that verifies public domain status before publishing. No DRM is touched and no copyrighted book is redistributed.

Does it work offline?

Yes. Once a book is on the device, both the text and the on-device narration work with no connection at all.

Is there a listening limit?

No. There is no monthly cap, no credits and no per-hour charge, because generating the audio costs the studio nothing.