Free audiobooks, honestly
There are five legitimate ways to listen without paying, and one of them is much better than the other four. The catch is what they cover: far less than the "1000 free audiobooks" lists imply, at least in the UK.
Disclosure: links on this page to Audible and Audiobooks.com are affiliate links — if you sign up or buy through one, we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. More about this
Start with the library
If you take one thing from this page: a UK library card gets you current, professionally produced audiobooks for nothing, through BorrowBox or Libby. Not old ones, not volunteer recordings — the same editions sold everywhere else, including this year’s releases. Membership is free.
Everything else on this page is a distant second, and we would say that even though this site earns nothing when you borrow a book.
The five ways
| Where | Cost | What you get | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your local library BestBorrowBox or Libby, with a UK library card | Free | Current, professionally produced audiobooks — the same recordings sold everywhere else, including titles published this year. | Waiting lists on popular books, and it goes back at the end of the loan. Library membership itself is free. |
| LibriVoxlibrivox.org, no account needed | Free | Public-domain books read by volunteers and donated back to the public domain. Genuinely free with no catch at all. | Readers are volunteers who choose their own books, so quality ranges from excellent to unlistenable, and it only covers works out of copyright. |
| Spotify PremiumIncluded if you already subscribe | No extra charge | A monthly allowance of listening hours from a large modern catalogue. | Not extra-free — you are already paying. Unused hours expire monthly. |
| Audible free trialA trial period, then it charges you | Free while the trial runs | An introductory trial whose length and contents Audible changes from time to time — the link shows what is running today. On the Premium tier a title taken during it is kept permanently. | It is a trial, not a free service. Set a reminder before it renews, and note the cheaper Standard tier is rental rather than purchase. |
| Audiobooks.com free trial30 days, then £7.99 a month plus applicable taxesSee their current trial | Free for 30 days | One premium audiobook to keep, plus two titles from their VIP Rewards selection. Terms read on audiobooks.com on 19 October 2026. | It renews automatically at £7.99 plus tax. The trial credit itself expires 30 days from issue, so spend it before you cancel or it is gone. The two VIP Rewards titles disappear if you cancel — only the premium one is yours to keep — and monthly credits expire three months after they are issued. |
Why so little of it is free
UK copyright lasts for the author’s lifetime plus seventy years. That single rule explains almost everything about what you will and will not find.
Of the 77 series on this site, 3 are out of copyright in the UK: The Chronicles of Barsetshire (Anthony Trollope, died 1882), The Palliser Novels (Anthony Trollope, died 1882) and Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle, died 1930). Other authors here are still in copyright, among them C.S. Lewis (until the end of 2033), Ian Fleming (2034), J.R.R. Tolkien (2043), Agatha Christie (2046) and Douglas Adams (2071).
Be careful with “free audiobook” lists: most are American, and US public domain works differently. A title that is genuinely free there may not be here. If a site is offering you a current bestseller for nothing, it is not a library — it is piracy, and the author gets nothing.
What LibriVox actually is
A non-commercial, non-profit, ad-free project. Volunteers record books that are out of copyright, and the finished audio is donated back to the public domain — in their own words, you may use it “for whatever purpose you wish”. No account, no subscription, no advertising. It is exactly what it appears to be.
The trade-off is the readers. They are volunteers who choose their own books, so the standard swings from genuinely good to hard going, sometimes within one title where chapters have different narrators. Several books exist in more than one version for that reason — LibriVox lists several versions of A Study in Scarlet. Listen to a few minutes before committing to ten hours.
The Sherlock Holmes recordings, free
One of the 3 series on this site that are out of UK copyright, and the one we have listed free recordings for. Runtimes are LibriVox’s.
| Title | Length | Sections |
|---|---|---|
| The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes | 10 hrs 18 mins | 12 |
| The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes | 8 hrs 35 mins | 11 |
| The Hound of the Baskervilles | 5 hrs 53 mins | 15 |
| The Sign of the Four | 4 hrs 17 mins | 12 |
| A Study in Scarlet | 4 hrs 17 mins | 14 |
Worth knowing the paid alternative is unusually good here: Stephen Fry reads the complete Sherlock Holmes, and it is one of the better-regarded recordings on the store. Free versus that is a real choice rather than an obvious one. The full listening order →
The Chronicles of Barsetshire and The Palliser Novels are out of UK copyright too, so a free volunteer recording of any of their books would be legal. We have not checked which ones LibriVox has recorded, so none are listed here.
Before you spend anything
- What audiobooks actually costCredits, hours and cash compared
- Before you buySix ways a listing is not the book you think
- Audible or Audiobooks.com?Both trials, both credit terms, side by side
- Spotify audiobooks in the UKHow the included hours work
- The Chronicles of Barsetshire in orderOut of copyright in the UK — Anthony Trollope died in 1882
- The Palliser Novels in orderOut of copyright in the UK — Anthony Trollope died in 1882
- Sherlock Holmes in orderOut of copyright in the UK — Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930