Public domain audiobooks

“Public domain” is the reason you can listen to Pride and Prejudice for nothing and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies for money. Here is what it means.

Copyright is a clock, not a wall

Copyright grants the author a monopoly on copying their work — for a while. When the term runs out, the work falls into the public domain: it belongs to everybody. Anyone may reprint it, translate it, adapt it, record it, or sell it, without a licence and without paying anyone.

The term varies by country and by publication date, which is why a title can be free in one place and still protected in another. Broadly, the further back a book was published, the more certain it is that the clock has run out.

Which books are we talking about?

Most of the canon. Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, Conan Doyle, Wilde, Melville, Twain, Wells, Stoker, Shelley, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in their older translations — all free. So are the Greek and Roman classics, most philosophy up to the early twentieth century, and a large slice of children’s literature.

Where to get them

• Project Gutenberg — the original digital library, running since 1971. Volunteer-proofread texts, each verified public domain before publication. Past 79,000 titles.
• LibriVox — the same books, read aloud by volunteers and released into the public domain themselves. Over 20,000 works.
• Open Library — the Internet Archive’s open catalogue, which is what pushes the combined total past 125,000.

All three are free and all three are legitimate. The friction is that they are three different websites with three different search boxes, and the audio is not always there.

What Aloud adds

One search across all three, and a narrator for the books nobody has recorded. When a LibriVox reading exists you hear the human. When it does not, your iPhone generates a lifelike voice on the device itself — offline, unlimited, and with your library never leaving the phone.

A deliberate limit

Aloud only draws from catalogues that guarantee public domain status at the source. There are far bigger archives online whose rights status is a mixture of the free, the orphaned and the plainly infringing, and they are deliberately not connected. A free audiobook is only worth having if it is legal.

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