The going rate for an audiobook membership from for-pay services such as Audible is around $15 per month. But there are plenty of great sites out there that let you stream or download audiobooks for free if you’re willing to put in a little bit of effort.
Here’s a short list of sites to check out before you pony up for a monthly membership.
Hoopla
Arguably your best choice if you’re looking for a nicely curated selection of popular audiobooks, Hoopla offers 21-day access to thousands of audiobooks to anyone who has a card for a participating library.
It’s also the cleanest and easiest if the sites to navigate on our list here, with audiobooks presented by popularity, genre, newness, and more.
Other than needing a library card, there’s one catch: This is very much a digital library, in that you’ll need to “check out” each audiobook. And there’s only a limited number of “copies” to be checked out at a time. But grab your library card, sign up, find an available book, and you’ll be listening in no time.
Libby
Similar to Hoopla, you’ll need a library card to access Libby, and you’ll need to virtually check out each book you’d like to listen to.
Once you’re in, you’ve got access to almost 16,000 high-quality audiobooks. Though you’ve got a huge selection of books, the interface isn’t nearly as easy to navigate as Hoopla’s—so this is a better bet if you’re looking for a particular title.
LibriVox
An interesting twist on free audiobooks, Librivox offers almost 19,000 free public-domain titles read by volunteers from around the world.
You’ll mostly find older titles here, but there are plenty of classics and you don’t need to check them out as you do at the library sites. And if you’re feeling especially ambitious, you can become a volunteer book reader yourself!
The site is browseable by author, title, genre, and language. There’s no sign-up necessary, either: Just click on a title, listen in your browser, or download the whole book for listening on the go.
Internet Archive
Think you’ve heard every audiobook ever recorded? Double-check your progress at the Internet Archive, which features a whopping 73,615 free audiobooks.
You may have to sift through a fair amount to find what you’re looking for, but the site features advanced search—such as year published, subject, collection, creator, and language.
Like LibriVox, the Internet Archive sports one-click access to audio-file downloads and in-browser playback with no account required.
Spotify*
Now, this isn’t technically free—hence the asterisk. But if you’re a Spotify Premium member, you recently got access to 15 hours worth of audiobook listening per month. There’s a huge selection, too—more than 150,000 titles in all. Non-premium members can purchase them on a one-off basis.
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