No matter if you’re looking for fairy tales, radio dramas, classics, or romance audiobooks, this article will provide you with options on where to find the best options to download them. There’s a mix of apps and web-based downloadable or streamable audio content.
Lit2Go has been around since 2006 and was started by the University of South Florida. It is a collection of free MP3 formatted stories and poems, that are often accompanied by reading strategies for further reading. There are classics from authors: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Anne Bronte, Robert Frost, and John Willis Menard. Lit2Go provides the ability to download up to 25 MP3 and/or text files for non-commercial work. Any amount above this for a single project requires permission from the Florida Center for Instructional Technology (FCIT) at USF. All clips on the website are also available on iTunesU for download.
Loyal Books offers free public domain audiobooks and Ebook downloads to anyone. The books are available in 29 languages, with options ranging from Ancient Greek and Urdu to Danish and Spanish.
Along with free audiobooks, Open Culture provides educational and cultural media to anyone who wants it. Topics range from religion to data science and are free to access. Audiobooks can be listened to via iTunes, RSS streams, or mp3 downloads.
Storynory is catered more towards children with classic fairytales, poems, and myths. However, this being said, anyone can find enjoyment in being read the Brothers Grimm or Aesop. Thanks to donations through Patreon, the audio can be streamed online.
If you have Spotify, take advantage of the audiobook playlists available on both the desktop and mobile apps. The playlist is made up of both complete books or books broken up into multiple songs/ segments. The list is not as exhaustive as some of the other options and will require you to remember the exact spot you stopped on, but it’s free and available.
Thought Audio is run on donations and provides free audiobooks of classic titles, biblical excerpts, and prayers. For those interested in finding their inner peace through meditations and faith, this is right up your alley. The media can be streamed or downloaded onto your computer.
This is the app that encourages people to enjoy libraries again. Through the app, users can access free audio and eBooks. OverDrive has partnerships with media companies and various publishing organizations that allow them to provide access to books that are not public domain books. By partnering with schools and libraries, users can create logins to access the material digitally that their school or library has.
The site offers audiobooks in 10 different languages and provides access to audiobooks, eBooks, and podcasts. Books through Digital Book are all free public domain audiobooks, that have been sourced from sites such as Amazon and Google Books, among others.
Archive is responsible for housing the catalogs of Project Gutenberg, LibriVox, Maria Lectrix, Naropa Poetics Audio Archive, and Internet Audio. The beauty of Archive is that it allows users to search its platform that will file through all five sites. It is a registered nonprofit that provides access to audiobooks, images, software programs, concerts, and web pages.
The platform was built to provide audiobooks for kids that are simple, clean, and short. The audiobooks can be easily streamed or downloaded to your computer or mobile device as well. Another big plus for Light Up is that transcripts are provided for the stories so that kids can follow along as the content is read aloud.
Project Gutenberg was founded in 1971 and is the oldest digital library. There are currently over 60,000 free mp3 files available for download. An interesting thing about the site is that it allows you to save chapters individually or download the whole book; the choice is yours. On the downside, some of the audiobooks are read by a computer, while humans read others.
Not only does Learn Out Loud provide audiobooks, but they also offer access to documentaries and speeches. Most of the books are free in their entirety, forever, but others will only be free for a trial period--just pay attention to it before you download! In addition to this, you may need a user account, which is free to listen to some audiobooks.
The project began as a radio series in Madison, WI on WHA Radio in the 1970s. There were more than 169 episodes recorded from initial release to the end of the series in 1984. The episodes are radio dramatizations of classic science fiction short stories read by Michael Hanson, which are now available for free through Mind Webs.
New Fiction provides access to amazing audiobooks that are known as “modern-day radio dramas.” All of the audiobooks can be downloaded or streamed relatively easily and are all free to access.
On Scribl, you can search through Ebooks, audiobooks, and podcasts to find your book-length of choice (novella, short story, textbook, etc.). There’s a mix of free and paid books available for purchase. One exciting thing about the site is that the authors themselves read a good majority of the books.
