← Guides 2 October 2026 · Aloud

How to listen to Project Gutenberg books on iPhone

Project Gutenberg has more than 79,000 free books, nearly all of them old enough to be out of copyright. Very few have ever been recorded. With the right file and a reader app, your iPhone can read any of them to you.

What Project Gutenberg is

It’s a volunteer library that has been typing up and proofreading public-domain books since 1971. The books are free to download, with no account and no limit. The catalogue leans towards English-language classics, so expect Austen, Dickens, Conan Doyle and Shelley, along with plenty of history and travel writing you’ve never heard of.

The catch is the age. Gutenberg follows United States copyright, so most of its books were published before the 1930s. Gutenberg asks readers in other countries to check their own copyright law, because terms differ. Why the cut-off sits where it does.

Step 1: Find the book

Search on gutenberg.org by title or author. Popular books often have several editions, such as a translation and a newer translation, or a version with the illustrations. Open the book’s page and check the release notes if you care which one you get.

Step 2: Download the right file

Each book page lists several formats. For listening, two matter:

• EPUB3 (or “EPUB, with images”). The best choice. It has a proper table of contents, so a reader app can split the book into real chapters.
• Plain Text UTF-8. Just the words. It works, but the app has to guess where chapters start, and the guess is only as good as the headings in the file.

Skip the Kindle formats and the HTML zip. On iPhone, tap the EPUB link in Safari and it lands in the Downloads folder in the Files app.

Step 3: Open it in an app that reads aloud

There are two routes, one built in and one an app.

Speak Screen. Open the EPUB in Apple Books, turn on Speak Screen in Settings under Accessibility, then swipe down with two fingers from the top of the screen. It’s free and built in. It reads the page you’re on and turns pages as it goes, but it has no chapter list for listening and no sleep timer. You’ll be finding your own place a lot. Speak Screen against a reader app.

A reader app that narrates. Share the file from Files to the app. A good one splits the book on the table of contents, remembers where you stopped, and keeps playing with the screen locked.

Step 4: Clean up the start

Gutenberg files open with a header: the licence, the release date, sometimes a transcriber’s note. Older books add a preface, a dedication or a long list of illustrations. Skip to chapter one before you press play, or you’ll spend the first five minutes listening to paperwork.

The shortcut: skip the download

Downloading files works, but it’s slow for more than a book or two. Aloud searches Project Gutenberg, Open Library and LibriVox from one search box, so you can tap a title and start listening without visiting the site. I make Aloud, so weigh that. If LibriVox has a human recording of the book, you can play that instead of the synthetic voice.

Books from that search are free and don’t use up an import. They’re narrated on the iPhone, so once a book and a voice are downloaded it plays with no connection. If you’d rather use a file you downloaded yourself, that works too, and your first import is free.

What to expect from the voice

Synthetic narration copes well with plain prose. Old books test it harder. Expect the odd stumble on made-up names, and on dialect spelled the way a character talks. Aloud lets you fix a word’s pronunciation in Settings so the book says it your way from then on. Dialogue-heavy fiction is where a good human reader still wins, so check LibriVox for those titles first.

Good first books to try

Short, plot-driven books work best while you get used to listening:

• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, twelve stories you can finish in a commute or two.
• A Christmas Carol, around three hours at normal speed.
• The War of the Worlds, which moves fast and has little dialect.
• Pride and Prejudice, once you’re happy with the voice on dialogue.

Common questions