When you are on the go, audiobooks can be a great substitute for ebook downloads. There is a plenty of options to listen to a talking book when you’re online: iTunes, podcasts, apps. But what to do when there’s no stable Internet connection? Happily, there are numerous websites offering free & cheap audiobook downloads. Most of them provide almost any possible book in the form of digital MP3, M4B (for iOS) or OGG files. So you can easily download and transfer audiobooks you want to your phone, tablet, cloud storage and enjoy them at anytime. Let’s compare 15 best sites with audiobooks downloads.
1. LIBRIVOX
Librivox is a public domain of free audiobooks made by volunteers. There is a good choice of book titles of various genres. You can download a whole audiobook as a ZIP file, torrent or subscribe via RSS or iTunes. The website provides a lot of information about the audiobook: dubbing cast, duration, archive file size, as well as related links to the author’s biography, online text and other audiobook download options (e.g., in M4B format).
Library: 9,000+ audiobooks
Price: free
2. LEARN OUT LOUD
Learn Out Loud offers a selection of over 10,000 free educational audiobooks. No account or subscription needed, you find an audiobook you want and download it. The books are mostly about politics, religion, philosophy, science. The site also has a great collection of lectures, sermons and interviews to download.
Library: 10,000+ audiobooks
Price: free
3. PODIOBOOKS
PodioBooks library is also small as it contains serialized audiobooks delivered via RSS. You won’t see famous names among authors, most of them are just getting exposure for their work. To download an audiobook, go to the Comments section and switch to the Download Episodes tab. Then save chapters one by one with right-button menu option “Save as..”. If you loved the book, you may donate the author.
Library: 1000+ audiobooks
Price: free
4. STORYNORY
Storynory hosts free audiobooks for kids. Here you’ll download fairy tales, myths, stories, and classic books for children in the audio format. The download options are either MP3 files or iTunes podcasts.
Library: several hundreds of audiobooks
Price: free
5. OPEN CULTURE
Open Culture website has a section of Free Audiobooks which contains links to free audiobook downloads from different resources including Audible, iTunes, YouTube, Spotify, and some public domain sites. The library contains chiefly classics which is usually free on all resources. However, some book titles will require you to buy Audible subscription.
Library: 700 audiobooks
Price: from free to $14.95
6. THOUGHTAUDIO
ThoughtAudio is a tiny website which contains various audiobooks, mostly classics and fiction. You can download books by chapters (no full audiobook download), as well as PDFs with transcripts. Another drawback is that there is no search bar on the website, so that you need to browse the threes pages of audiobook downloads.
Library: 100 audiobooks
Price: free
7. EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY CLEARINGHOUSE
Educational Technology Clearinghouse collects audiobooks forstudents. The genres are: science, adventure, epic, fable, fantasy, history, mystery, philosophy, etc. Search for an audiobook, download it in MP3 or get a PDF transcript if necessary. for your ease, the books are split into parts.
Library: about 200 audiobooks
Price: free
8. FREE CLASSIC AUDIOBOOKS
Free Classic Audiobooks website has a bunch of popular classic books in English which you get using search box. The sites looks very outdated and has a lot of advertising banners, still the audiobook library is rich. You can find here such authors as O’Henry, Mark Twain, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, even Alexandre Pushkin. Download this audio content in MP3 and M4B formats.
Library: 100+ audiobooks
Price: free
9. PROJECT GUTENBERG
In contast to the above listed sites, Project Gutenberg offers computer-generated audiobooks. This open-source project doesn’t have a convenient search. It’s also hard to figure out what the numerous MP3 files for one and the same book are. However, there is a good list of audiobooks on more than 50 languages.
Library: 2000+ audiobooks
Price: free
