Download free Audiobooks from these Internet resources
Audiobooks are becoming increasingly popular and there are many pay sites on the Internet that offer audiobooks for a price.
Audiobooks are great, as they let you enjoy books in situations where you cannot read: during a jog or other activity, while you drive a car, or just want to relax with your eyes closed on the couch.
It is, however, possible to download free Audiobooks from various sites on the Internet as well which is often a suitable alternative, especially since the number of human-read free audio book sites is growing.
While you won't get the latest bestseller audiobooks for free, you may get your hands on a lot of classic books and other interesting books, some of which are not available on commercial sites at all.
The main problem with finding those free sites is that many paysites offer free samples of Audiobooks as well but you have to pay when you want to listen to the complete book.
It should also be noted that there is a difference in quality. Human readers are of course capable of narrating the story in a higher quality than a computer reader can ever achieve.
The following websites offer high quality Audiobooks that can be downloaded for free to your computer. I try to list some of the most remarkable books from those sites next to the link to give you an impression about the content that they offer.
Free Audiobook sites
Archive.org Audio Books & Poetry
Hosts more than 14,000 audio books currently which you may play online directly or download to your computer or device for offline listening.
The selection includes all-time classics such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Moby Dick, or the Whale, or Pride and Prejudice.
Thought Audio
Thought Audio offers a good collection of mostly classic novels such as Metamorphosis from Kafka and Thus Spoke Zarathustra from Nietzsche.
A good but somewhat limited selection of titles. All downloads are divided into multiple parts.
Free Classic Audiobooks
Free Classic Audiobooks hosts Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll and Treasure Island by Stevenson. You do find some language courses thrown into the mix as well.
Has a large selection of books, with the majority available both as mp3 and M4B files. You can browse the collection by author, popularity or explore collections that are maintained by the operators of the site.
Podiobooks Scrible
Podiobooks was a source for serialized Audiobooks offered in Podcast format. You won't find classic books here but a large selection of books from contemporary authors.
The service merged with Scribl and audiobooks are now available on that site. Make sure you deselect ebooks from the filter listing to only get audiobook results on Scribl. Note that Scribl hosts free and paid audiobooks.
Voices in the Dark
Voices in the Dark hosts a large collection of Audiobooks from authors such as H.G. Wells and Edgar Allen Poe. The main page lists options to browse audiobooks by genre, full title or author index.
The site lists only about 30 or so authors and some of their works on the site. While that may be disheartening, the quality of the selection should make up for that. Audiobooks are offered as high and low quality versions on the site.
The Audio Book Project
This is part of the massive Project Gutenberg library. The website offers human-read and computer-read audiobooks in various languages. There are hundreds of English audiobooks read by humans on the site, from Ragged Dick by Horatio Alger over Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift to Around the world in 80 days by Jules Verne.
There is a lot to explore on the site and you will spend some time browsing through its offerings. Definitely one of the largest free audiobook repositories on the Internet.
Books Should Be Free Loyal Books
Loyal Books hosts a selection of more than 7000 audiobooks all free to stream on the website directly or for download in various formats including mp3 and M4b. Note that the service seems to aggregate audiobooks from other services such as archive.org.
What is interesting is that they also make available ebooks in various formats so that you can not only listen to the book but also read it by yourself.
Story Nory
Story Nory specializes in audio books for children. While designed with children in mind, it does not mean that adults can't enjoy the audio books they make available as well.
The site divides its offerings into original stories created for the site, fairy tales, classic children stories, educational books and junior.
You can listen to any audio book directly on the website or download it in mp3 format to the local computer instead.
Learn out Loud
The web shop offers free audio books apart from the ones that you have to pay for.
It hosts thousands of free books that you can download to your system. Note that you do need to create an account on the website before you can download any free audio book from it.
Lit2Go
Offers a free collection of stories and poems in audiobook format. You can browse the selection by author, title or genre, and what may be really interesting by readability level.
All audiobooks can be downloaded from the website for free, or listened to online directly.
Other audiobook websites
- AudioBooks Free is a channel on YouTube that offers direct access to more than 100 audio books that have been uploaded to the channel. You can listen to them directly on the YouTube website.
- Audio Literature Odyssey is a literature podcast by Nikolle Doolin. Audiobooks can be downloaded from iTunes or directly from the website. Besides that, you also find summaries and comments on the page which provides you with additional information.
- Digital Book hosts audiobooks and ebooks. The site includes options to filter by format so that you get pure audiobook listings this way.
- Kiddie Records offers classic children's book as audiobooks. The collection is rather large and all are available for download directly from the website.
- LibriVox offers a large collection of audiobooks in various languages that you can download directly from the website. Downloads are being made available in various formats including mp3 and ogg.
- Light up your brain offers a selection of audio books for children. All stories can be downloaded or read online.
- New Fiction calls the selection of audio books it makes available moder-day radio dramas. Don't expect any classics but if you are open for something new, you may want to give it a try.
- Open Culture links to 900 free audiobooks elsewhere on the Internet.
No longer available
Free Audio Books- A website from the UK that is providing you with access to hundreds of audio book downloads. You can stream the books to your PC or download them instead. Seems to use the Archive.org repository.Public Domain Audiobooks Ejuntoconcentrates on historic and philosophic audio books.
Do you know more sources for free Audiobooks that are read by humans? Let me know, always looking for more.
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- Audiobooks.com Launches Audiobook Flatrate Service
- Free Audiobooks from the Gutenberg Project
- Material Audiobook Player for Android review
- Prepare your Audiobooks for a Roadtrip
- Turn Books into Audiobooks with AudioBookMaker
Why not make use of the mplayer.conf?
Huh, I have never even seen this “font cache” pane; videos play at once for me, using VLC & XP SP3.
Mike, in theory this should have only been displayed once to you, at the very first video that you played with VLC. The time this window is displayed depends largely on the number of fonts in your font directory.
huh, I lucked out for a change?? Amazing!!
Apparently VLC keeps this info through version updates, but I didn’t see this message after a fresh OS install about 8 weeks ago, & a new VLC.
yes, yes, i have the same problem. sometimes, VLC crashes when it is playing .mov file.
Error:
Buidling font Cache pop-up
Solution:
Open VLC player.
On Menu Bar:
Tools
Preferences
(at bottom – left side)
Show settings — ALL
Open: Video
Click: Subtitles/OSD (This is now highlited, not opened)
Text rendering module – change this to “Dummy font renderer function”
Save
Exit
Re-open – done.
Progam will no longer look outside self for fonts
Source – WorthyTricks.co.cc
Great tip, thanks a lot Kishore.
@Kishore, I’ll try your tips, but does this mean it will no longer show subtitles either?
I do use subtitles, but the fontcache dialog box pops up (almost) everytime I play a file.
Could this be related to the fonts I have installed? Or if I add/remove fonts to my system?
I’ll try to do a fresh install also, if your tips does no work. I’ll post back here later…
/thanks
/j
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,Dont worry, VLC is currently sorting out this issue and the next version will be out soon.
No probs @ Martin !! Its my pleasure
Try running LC with administrator privileges. That seemed to fix it for me
I am using SMplayer 0.8.6 (64-bit) (Portable Edition) on Windows 7 x64. Even with the -nofontconfig parameter in place SMplayer still scans the fonts. Also, I have enabled normal subtitles and it is still scanning fonts before playing a video. Also, it does this every time the player opens a video after a system restart (only the fist video played).
Does that mean that only instrumental versions of songs will be available for non-paying users?