LibriVox audiobooks on your iPhone

LibriVox is one of the best things on the internet and one of the least pleasant to use on a phone. Aloud is a nicer front door to it.

What LibriVox is

A volunteer project that records public domain books, chapter by chapter, and releases the recordings into the public domain as well. Over 20,000 works, read by real people, free to download, free to keep, free forever. No account, no catch, no advertising.

The recordings are genuinely human. Some readers are superb, some are amateur, and a book with several readers can change voice at every chapter. That variability is the honest price of the thing being free and volunteer-made.

The problem on a phone

LibriVox itself is a catalogue and an archive, not an app. Getting a book onto an iPhone tends to mean a website, a zip file, a pile of loose MP3s and a media player that has no idea it is holding a book. Chapters land out of order. You lose your place. Nothing syncs.

What Aloud does about it

• Search the whole catalogue from inside the app, alongside Project Gutenberg and Open Library.
• Chapters in the right order, with the position remembered per book rather than per file.
• Download for offline and keep what you want on the device.
• Standard playback controls — speed, skip, sleep timer, lock screen, CarPlay.
• A generated voice for the gaps. This is the real addition: only a fraction of public domain books have a human recording. For the rest, your iPhone narrates the Gutenberg text itself, on-device.

Human recording or generated voice?

Both, and the choice is yours per book. A well-read LibriVox recording beats synthesis every time and Aloud will offer it first. But a synthesised voice that exists beats a human recording that does not, and for most of the 125,000 titles in the catalogue that is the actual comparison.

Does this take anything from LibriVox?

No. The recordings are public domain by the volunteers’ own choice, and they stay free — Aloud is not reselling them, it is playing them properly. If you enjoy the recordings, LibriVox is always looking for readers and proof-listeners.

See Aloud →