Where to find Audiobooks for Free – 7 Websites

Last updated on 20 March 2023

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When I started listening to audiobooks, my reading throughout the year increased by a LOT. But with a lot of audiobooks on the go, I needed a way to enjoy them without emptying my wallet all the time. What I needed was a way to find audiobooks for free.

I tend to listen to audiobooks while I’m at work, and often at a faster speed (usually 1.75, though sometimes at a 1.5, depending on who is reading it), as I find narrators always talk a lot slower than I would physically read a book. Some say it’s cheating, I say it’s time-saving.

Regardless of what you think, there are so many places you can get free audiobooks online, and in this post, I’m going to share with you 7 different places you can find audiobooks for free.

👉🏻 Psst. My favourite way to find free audiobooks is the last one!

7 Places to Find Free Audiobooks Online

1. Librivox
2. Project Gutenberg
3. Audible
4. Spotify
5. YouTube
6. NetGalley
7. Overdrive

Librivox Free Audiobooks

Librivox is a great site for discovering free public-domain audiobooks. Public-domain books are books that are no longer under copyright, as the author has passed away 70 or more years ago. Think books such as some of Agatha Christie’s collection, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, all of Shakespeare and Jane Austen … you get the gist. Old ones.

Volunteers record the books and make them available for free on Librivox, and you can browse their catalogues by author, title, or genre. To listen to an audiobook from Librivox, you can easily use their online player, or you can download the books to your device and listen to them that way.

Project Gutenberg Audiobooks

Project Gutenberg is well known for its public domain ebooks, but did you know they also do audiobooks? And you can listen to them for free! Much like Librivox, Project Gutenberg has hundreds of audiobooks available to listen to for free, but you can also choose to listen to books that are read by a human or a computer.

The other cool thing about Project Gutenberg’s audiobook collection is that there are books read in a bunch of different languages. So if English isn’t your first language, you can easily find audiobooks to listen to, or if you’re learning another language, then listening to well-known public domain audiobooks is a good way to keep learning!

Audible Free Audiobooks

Although Audible is a paid service, they do offer a selection of free audiobooks. As Audible is an Amazon company, all you have to do is sign in with your Amazon account, and you’ll get access to hundreds of free audiobooks and podcasts, without having to sign up for a membership.

This is a great option if you’re looking for those public domain books (and Audible originals!), but also don’t want to sign up for yet another website. Just use your Amazon account! You can also find free audiobooks on the Audible app.

Audiobooks on Spotify

Spotify has a small selection of audiobooks that you can listen to for free, which is wonderful! Spotify (as of early 2022) has around 456 million active users (😱) so the chances that you are one of them are high. This means that YOU have access to audiobooks!

They’re done in chapters, so you can easily listen to a chapter here and there, or plough through the entire book. Remember that you if you don’t have Spotify Premium, you’ll also have ads. But hey! Free audiobooks!

YouTube audiobooks

If you’re more of a YouTube fan, you can actually find public-domain audiobooks on YouTube. You’ll also probably discover books that are still in copyright, as users will upload them illegally. Of course, you can still listen to your heart’s content, just realise that they’re unlikely to have gotten permission to put them up there. Let your consciousness do the deciding for you. 😉

NetGalley Audiobooks

If you’re a blogger or you talk about books online somewhere, you can sign up for a free NetGalley account. Then you put in requests to read or listen to books that are yet to come out. This is perfect if you love talking about books online and want to share more about audiobooks, without having ot buy them.

NetGalley does ask that you share your thoughts to help promote the authors’ works, but it’s a great way to get your foot in the door of ARC (Advance Reader Copy) reading.

Overdrive and Libby for Audiobooks

This is hands down the best audiobook library app you’ll find, and my favourite way to access free audiobooks.

If you have a library card and your library has signed up to Overdrive, you can download the Libby app (which is made by Overdrive) and get access to thousands of free audiobooks!

It works like this: You pop in your library card details and your library (eg Auckland Libraries), and then you can browse all the audiobooks and ebooks available to you at your library. You simply Borrow the book and you have up to 28 days to read or listen to it (some libraries have it set to 21 days, but you can change how long you wish to have the book for). When your due date comes along, Libby simply sucks your book away into the library abyss, so make sure you’ve listened to it before the due date!

If a book isn’t available at the time you want it,  you can also put a reserve on the book and you’ll be placed in a virtual line. You’ll then be notified when the book is ready for you and then you can Borrow it, or schedule it to be delivered later. This means that the next person in line will get the book, but you’ll stay at the top of the queue.

So what do you think? Have you tried any of these free audiobook platforms? Let me know in the comments!