Yes. LibriVox is entirely free to use, and you will never have to pay to download an audiobook from LibriVox.

It is a nonprofit with a mission of providing free audiobooks to everyone, including those who can’t afford them. Whether you don’t have time to read books or you have bad eyesight, LibriVox’s goal is to help you.

As I mentioned, the site is ad-free and subscription-free as well. There is no limit to how many audiobooks you can download from the site, and once you download an audiobook, you can keep it forever.

Yes. LibriVox only publishes recordings of books that are already in the public domain in the United States.

Since LibriVox is registered and hosted in the United States, it follows the copyright laws of the United States. It won’t record any book that is under copyright in the United States.

In addition, when a volunteer uploads a recording to LibriVox, they agree to release it into the public domain as well. So, it is entirely legal to listen to LibriVox audiobooks, at least in the United States.

What about other countries? It is possible that while a book is in the public domain in the United States, it is under copyright in another country.

Therefore, if you are not in the United States, you should verify the copyright status of a book in your country before listening to it on LibriVox.

The work that would have to go into making sure a book is in the public domain in every single country is just too much for LibriVox to do, which is why it only guarantees that the book is in the public domain in the US.

LibriVox allows anyone to volunteer to read audiobooks. There are no tests, auditions, or requirements.

You can volunteer in any language, regardless of where you live.

While that’s a noble concept that ensures more people sign up to give back to the community, it also created a situation in which many audiobooks just have terrible audio quality.

Sometimes, narrators on LibriVox use flat, boring tones that make you want to rip your headphones out of your ears and never listen to a LibriVox recording again. At other times, the narrator may switch from a quiet tone to a loud one for no reason, hurting your ears.

Narrators sometimes use horrible fake accents when imitating accents in the book (for example, when reading lines from French characters speaking in English).

At other times, the narrators themselves are non-native speakers and have accents that make them difficult to understand.

Another issue you may run into is that a book can be made by several narrators. Remember, some volunteers are only down to read certain chapters from a book, and not an entire book.

In such a case, other volunteers will step in and read the other chapters. That means that an audiobook can be quite disjointed.

You might enjoy the first few chapters of an audiobook, only to experience utter disappointment when listening to the rest of the audiobook.

There is pretty much no quality control on LibriVox. While this fits well with its mission to provide as many audiobooks as possible, it also means that you may have an unpleasant experience using LibriVox as a listener.

Remember, most of the narrators on LibriVox are just ordinary people. They are not professional narrators.

Even if they do a decent job, the narration quality just won’t be nearly as good as one made by a professional narrator. That is true for their tone of voice, accent, intonation, and general narration style.

Yes, LibriVox has over 15,000 works, but most of them are very old. In fact, most of them are from 1923 or before.

LibriVox is safe. You don’t have to worry about adware, viruses, or malware when using it.

It is also entirely free. There is no catch here – it is a nonprofit and does not aim to make money in any way.

However, you will mostly find old books there, not new ones. That’s because old books get released into the public domain 95 years after publication, by default.

So, while it’s good for old classics, it’s not great if you want self-help books, for example.

Also, the quality is really a hit and miss. Many audiobooks from LibriVox are just a pain to listen to, as the narrators don’t have a good narration style, speak in accents or tones that make them hard to understand, or just don’t put a lot of effort into making a good production.

Tom Clayton

Tom loves to write on technology, e-commerce & internet marketing.
Tom has been a full-time internet marketer for two decades now, earning millions of dollars while living life on his own terms. Along the way, he’s also coached thousands of other people to success.