Free public-domain audiobooks with the text to read along

Some of the best books ever written cost nothing, in two forms at once. Volunteers have recorded thousands of public-domain books, and other volunteers have set their texts with great care. Put a recording next to its text and you can read along with Dickens, Austen or Conrad for free, legally, and keep both files forever.

Where the audio comes from: LibriVox

LibriVox is a long-running volunteer project that records public-domain books and releases the recordings into the public domain. Each book has a page with its readers, its source text and its downloads: usually an M4B of the whole book, or a zip of MP3s, one per section.

Two things are worth knowing before you pick one:

• Readers vary. Some books have one reader from start to finish; others are read by a group, a chapter each. Listen to a minute of the first section before you commit to a long book.
• The page names the source text. That matters for the next step.

Where the text comes from

• Standard Ebooks produces carefully proofread, beautifully typeset editions of public-domain books and releases its own work under CC0. Download the “compatible EPUB”.
• Project Gutenberg has more than 75,000 public-domain books in EPUB, plain text and HTML. Its editions are the raw material many other projects start from.

Matching the edition

Reading along only works when the text says what the narrator says. For public-domain books that mostly comes down to two checks:

1. Same translation. A LibriVox reading of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground in Constance Garnett’s translation needs Garnett’s text. A modern translation will not line up.
2. Same text. Some LibriVox readings use a particular printing; the LibriVox page links to it. Standard Ebooks editions follow the original text, with modernised spelling in places, which a good sync shrugs off.¹

When the two agree, the sync is as good as with any commercial pair. Often better: volunteer narrators tend to read exactly what is on the page.

The fifteen that come with Voxlight

To save you the hunting, Voxlight ships with fifteen of these pairs already made: LibriVox recordings with Standard Ebooks editions, checked against each other and synced word by word. They appear on a new install with an empty library, ready before you import anything.

They run from thirteen minutes (The Gift of the Magi) to about eleven hours (Pride and Prejudice). If you want a first one, The Call of the Wild is a good length and Mark F. Smith reads it beautifully; the opening page is on the home page, with the real timings.

You can remove the shelf in Settings → Public Domain Library, and bring every book back from the same place. A book you delete yourself stays deleted.

Adding more

The shelf is a starting point, not a limit. To add another public-domain book:

1. Download the M4B (or the zip of MP3s) from the book’s LibriVox page.
2. Download the matching EPUB from Standard Ebooks or Project Gutenberg.
3. Import the audio in Voxlight, add the EPUB on the book’s page, and choose Sync Chapters → Full Sync.

The details are in How to sync an audiobook with its ebook on iPhone. For books still in copyright, the DRM-free catalogue lists stores that sell audiobooks and ebooks as files you keep.