Resources for free audiobooks | audiobooks free download
Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links. When you buy through links on my site, I may earn a small commission. Thank you for your support.
Audiobooks are a fun and effective way to get your children to read more. They’re portable, allow multitasking, don’t strain the eyes, and provide an immersive reading experience.
Audiobooks are especially useful for introducing reluctant readers to the classics. Hearing the book performed by a talented voice actor makes the material alive come alive while easing the barrier posed by the sophisticated language.
I recommend following along with the printed version while listening to the audiobook to get the best of both worlds. By reading while listening, learners can improve their reading fluency, or the ability to read with speed, accuracy, and expression. Moreover, audiobooks provide correct models for prosody, which refers to timing, phrasing, emphasis and intonation. Just make sure that the print version matches the audiobook word-for-word.
There’s plenty of websites where you can download or listen to free audiobooks. Most of the audiobooks available in the public domain are literary classics. Selections can overlap, so you don’t have to check every site that shows up on Google search. I’ve narrowed my recommendation down to four sites that offer free audiobooks for downloading or listening.
Lit2Go is a free online collection of stories and poems in Mp3 (audiobook) format. This site tops my list because it’s designed with the learner in mind by providing not just audiobooks but also the corresponding reading passages in PDF form. The PDFs can be printed and used as a read-along or supplemental reading material. Lit2Go also gives an abstract, citation, playing time, and word count for each of the passages. The audiobooks are categorized by Author, Books, Genres, Collections, and Readability. Lit2Go is a project of the University of South Florida’s College of Education.
Librivox has a huge collection of free public domain audiobooks read by volunteers from around the world. You can browse the catalog by Author, Title, Genre/Subject, or Language. Have a talent for reading aloud? Volunteer to read and record chapters of public domain books for Librivox. There’s also a forum where you can interact with fellow readers and volunteers.
The Internet Archive’s Audio Archive
The Internet Archive’s Audiobooks & Poetry collection boasts more than 64,000 results, including LibriVox’s free audiobook collection. The vast repository includes poetry, short stories, whole books, even dramatic works, in many different languages. You can filter the search results by media type, year, topics/subjects, collection, creator, and language.
A provider of free educational and cultural media to the worldwide learning community, Open Culture offers 1,000 free audiobooks in MP3 format. The collection includes both fiction and non-fiction, from Aesop’s Fables to Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis” (read by Patti Smith).
