Free audiobooks, honestly
There are four legitimate ways to listen without paying, and one of them is much better than the other three. The catch is what they cover: far less than the "1000 free audiobooks" lists imply, at least in the UK.
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 four 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 trial30 days, then it charges you | Free for 30 days | One title of your choosing, kept permanently if you take it on the Premium tier. | 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. |
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 65 series on this site, exactly one is out of copyright in the UK: Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle having died in 1930. Agatha Christie (1976), Tolkien (1973), C.S. Lewis (1963), Ian Fleming (1964) and Douglas Adams (2001) are all still in copyright here, and will be for decades.
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 — A Study in Scarlet is on its second. Listen to a few minutes before committing to ten hours.
The Sherlock Holmes recordings, free
The one part of our own catalogue you can have for nothing. 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 →