How to Get Free Audiobooks: The Ultimate Guide for Book Lovers

Yes, you can get free audiobooks from your library, but it can take some figuring out. When you get audiobooks from your library, you don’t do it from the same portal where you might reserve physical books. You have to do it from a separate app.

This is how to do it (or at least how it works for my library):

• Go to your library’s website
• Look for the section on Digital ebooks and audiobooks (check the menu in the main navigation or search for it if you can’t find it).
• On this page, your library should tell you which app they use for distributing their audiobooks. If you still can’t find it, you can also search for your library from the apps that libraries commonly use. Here are some commonly used apps:
  • Cloudlibrary
  • Hoopla
  • Libby
• Once you have the app downloaded and you are logged in, you can start searching for audiobooks!

Something to keep in mind is that you are borrowing these audiobooks, and after the borrowing period is up, the app will claw back the book. At my library, I’m allowed to borrow the books for two weeks. (If there isn’t a hold on the book, I can usually reborrow it right away.)

Also, if a book isn’t available to borrow right away, you can put a “hold” on it just like you would for a physical book. On my app, it shows how many days you have to wait until it becomes available, but wait times can be long for popular books. Because of this, my favorite use of the library for audiobooks is for backlist titles.

The other thing to keep in mind about the library is that it doesn’t tend to have an exhaustive library of books like an app like Audible or Libro.fm. If I want to borrow a more popular book, I might have to wait months for it to become available. If it’s a book I’m really eager to listen to, then I will just get it from a paid platform.

Another thing worth mentioning is that libraries still have audiobooks on physical CDs that you can also borrow for free (at least mine does).

Librivox is a free library of audiobooks. All of the books you can get on Librivox are in the public domain and are read by volunteers. Books become part of the public domain when the copyright expires. (And there’s a variety of rules around when this is, depending on when the book was published.)

Librivox also offers digital ebooks, but they say they really consider themselves a library of audiobooks, since you can get public-domain ebooks elsewhere as well.

Given that Librivox only offers audiobooks in the public domain, it’s a good resource for classic books.

I like to browse their catalog by genre. They also have audiobooks in several languages.

They do have an app you can use to access audiobooks that can be downloaded from the App Store or the Google Play Store.

Digitalbook.io offers both free ebooks and audiobooks. What it’s trying to do is create a library of all of the free audiobooks and ebooks from different sources around the web and bring them into one place. The sources they are gathering from include Librivox, Project Gutenberg, Google Books, Amazon, Apple Books, and more.

They say they offer more than 100,000 free audiobooks and ebooks. It also offers books in more than 60 languages.

Digitalbook also offers an app that can be accessed through the App Store or the Google Play Store.

These aren’t technically free, but if you are paying for one of these services, you actually get audiobooks as an additional perk of the service:

• Kindle Unlimited: Kindle Unlimited has several books that you can get on audio in addition to ebooks. (This is something I just discovered this year.) One thing that’s cool about this is that you can sync the audiobook with the Kindle app, and read the book on both and even take advantage of the Whispersync feature, which allows you to listen and read at the same time. It comes with a 30 Day Free trial, if you want to try it out. (Keep an eye out for deals around Prime Day and Black Friday, too.)
• Amazon Music Unlimited: Amazon Music Unlimited also gives you one free audiobook per month from the Audible catalog. However, the app is not as robust as the Audible app. For example, you aren’t able to adjust the listening speed in the same increments as you can on the Audible app. But, if you’re paying for this service, definitely take advantage of your free audiobook!

There may be others! If you know of other apps or subscriptions that offer audiobooks as an additional perk, please share below!

Both YouTube and YouTube Music offer free audiobooks. All of the audiobooks on YouTube Music appear to be in the public domain, but that is not the case on YouTube. I did a search for “audiobooks full length”, and I saw several newer books in the search results.

There are also YouTube channels devoted to specific genres:

• Historical Fiction
• Thrillers & Crime Fiction and more Mysteries
• Classic Literature
• Action Novels
• Fantasy

Given that it’s YouTube, you will have to put up with ads throughout the book, but that’s a small price to pay for getting an audiobook for free!

This may seem counterintuitive, but several paid services also offer special free audiobooks, and you don’t always need to be a subscriber to take advantage of them. Here are some of the services that offer free audiobooks:

• Audible: If you subscribe to the Audible Premium Plus membership you get access to Audible’s Audible Plus catalog, which includes 150k audiobooks and podcasts. The books available rotate (sort of how shows and movies rotate in and out of Netflix), but they usually have a really good selection.
• Free Trials: A lot of paid subscriptions offer a free one-month trial to test out their service, including Audible.