Free Public Domain Audiobooks | Hacker News Reader

Free Public Domain Audiobooks

librivox.org

103 pointsdoener22 comments

Love librivox.

Couple of tips:

1) atleast in United States you can use Libby app with a valid library card for non public domain audiobooks. However Wait times are going to be in pain.

2) I’ve created an iOS app based on librivox with additional functionalities like saving history, ease of use, sleep timers, offline , speed etc.,

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/librivox-audiobooks-zlibrary/i...

> atleast in United States

Is working in Quebec, Canada as well.

I read somewhere that libraries pay a decent amount to the publishers for every audiobook borrowed through Libby. So I always try to make sure the book interests me and will actually listen to it once borrowed.

Thanks for making this app and it saves a few steps from downloading the books directly and playing them through Dropbox or some other app that plays mps3.

I don’t understand the subscription angle from a user standpoint. Why is this $10/year? There’s no per user costs for you. I wanted to purchase the app as its quite convenient, but having a subscription for what I expect to use for the rest of my life doesn’t seem wise to me.

Also coupled with the fact that I have a family so I’d need to pay $50/year just to listen to free librevox recordings.

Thanks for your reply.

Just wanted to clarify couple of points before explaining the $10/year for premium subscription for the app.

1) In iOS, there is a perk that developers can enable where if someone has a subscription for the app, the family members in iCloud settings (upto 6) are also automatically included with no additional cost. Many apps don't enable it though, but I've enabled it for all my apps since the day I introduced pricing.

2) The app itself is free, adhering to public domain ethos, even without the premium subscription there is no blocker to listen to thousands of books. I've included all the popular books, and in addition to the home page, explore section where you can filter by tags, languages will also enable anyone to listen with no ads or whatsoever. I'll explain more below regarding why I had to include $10 and some technical aspects.

In order to have seamless ux, I had to create and maintain a database and api with data which incur some cost but not earth shattering. The original problem I had with librivox is that there's a lot of metadata like description that's not searchable and if someone wants to read a book on a topic or keyword that's hidden deep inside description, it won't be shown on the website.

In order to solve this issue, I've created a service similar to elastic search, which proven to useful but a bit costly at the level where it means that I have to shut down the app in the long run.

So unhappily I introduced premium subscription that enables this feature. My plan was to introduce more features like importing audiobooks etc., however last time checked this app is not in breakeven range regarding the cost, so at the moment I'm focusing on other projects. Less than 0.01% buy the subscription which is not great but that at least reduce the risk of me incurring huge loss. The current state is that I do not want to take down the app for a simple reason that I've spent quite a bit time developing it, a lot of free users are still using it and leaving the door open for future if it at least gets in breakeven zone, so currently just doing minimal maintenance and fixing bugs if any occasionally.

A tip that I can share at my expense is that, even if you don't want to pay $10/year but want to use the advanced search, you can start the free trial that lasts for 7 days, just listen for few moments and download those keyword targeted audiobooks, so that they stay in your history. So even when you cancel the free trial, you can still enjoy your targeted audiobooks and thousands of books shown in home and explore screen. You have to cancel the trial before end of 6th day though.

Thanks for the note and these seem like understandable reasons.

I would have paid a one time fee just to “reward” you. Instead I downloaded the LibriVox app (free but with ads or subscription) that has a much more advanced UI. And then I just downloaded VLC and search and download directly from librevox.org. Comically, this works best on my iPhone and I’m again grateful for VLC and the great open source/free work they do.

I’ve always released under Apache/BSD/MIT to explicitly allow others to commercialize, if they want. So I’m just criticizing, just lamenting the fewer purchase offerings and more needless (to me) saas offerings. If the product doesn’t provide some ongoing improvement, then I don’t want saas. Storing books and usage data on my device is not a useful saas service. I’m still butthurt over paying $60 to ynab for them to switch to a crappier version of saas that provides less functionality.

Glad it worked for you.

There is also https://www.vorleser.net/ for german users.

In case you want to take it a step further, you could convert the `mp3`s to `m4b` format (one file per audio book), which internally uses an `mp4` container aac codec, chapters for separation and extended metadata.

It's well supported on iTunes / iPods / iPhone as well as Jellyfin, Kodi, Plex, etc. and the files have lower bitrates than mp3 providing similar quality. (see https://github.com/seanap/Plex-Audiobook-Guide#optional-auto...)

There is also https://www.thorsten-voice.de/en/motivation-vision-english/ (see my comment below), if you would like to generate your own german audio books via TTS and AI.

A self hosted audio book server is audiobookshelf (https://www.audiobookshelf.org/) which comes with an app that is open souce and supports offline listening.

Tools to convert `mp3` to `m4b` and edit metadata:

- AudioBookConverter - https://github.com/yermak/AudioBookConverter (GUI, cross platform)

- Chapter and Verse - http://lodensoftware.com/chapter-and-verse/

- m4b-tool - https://github.com/sandreas/m4b-tool (command line, cross platform)

- tone - https://github.com/sandreas/tone (command line, cross platform)

Note: I'm the author of the last two tools.

I just wanted to say thank you for your work. I’ve used m4b-tool and some other projects that use it as a dependency and I am glad to be reminded of tone. It was just getting started last I looked at the project.

Thank you, I really appreciate that. Unfortunately I'm too busy atm to put too much effort in, but there are some nice things coming up :-)

I'm also sometimes working on `Tone Audio Player` (https://github.com/sandreas/ToneAudioPlayer), which is planned as cross platform iPod Nano inspired app, that is able to stream and download from different services (Navidrome, Audiobookshelf, Jellyfin, Kodi, etc.). But this project has just started and will not really progress until I have more time.

If you are interested, take a look at AvaloniaUI (https://avaloniaui.net/), a really nice cross platform (incl. WASM) UI Toolkit for C#.

My personal favorite find from Librivox: My Man Jeeves, by P. G. Wodehouse, narrated by Mark Nelson. Well narrated and very funny. https://librivox.org/my-man-jeeves-by-p-g-wodehouse/

An extensive amount of PG's works are now out of copyright, and he wrote way more than many people know; he has, for example, extensive school stories that are quite fun.

> An extensive amount of PG's works are now out of copyright

This is one of the rare instances where works have entered the public domain in the US before other countries. None of Wodehouse's works are in the public domain in the UK, EU, India or Canada.

If you don’t tell on them I won’t when they access Gutenburg from illegal IPs.

I recently found the Voice Audiobook Player for Android on the google play store[1][2]. Point it to a folder and it looks in there for audiobooks, one per subfolder, and keeps track of which ones you've read and where you are in each one.

No signup, no ads (albeit maybe analytics and crash telemetry), GPL3 code, fairly minimal and keeps audiobooks away from messing up music playlists or from podcast app complexity. Haven't used it enough to give a full review, but it seems exactly what I wanted and good for Libribox book downloads.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.ph1b.audiob...

[2] source: https://github.com/PaulWoitaschek/Voice

I hope AI voice tech like https://beta.elevenlabs.io/ will make audiobooks even better.

It definitely seems like it should be plausible to offer multiple AI readings of all public domain books.

It seems like it should be plausible to offer AI readings of any book I’ve purchased. It seems strange that ebook readers aren’t allowed to run the ebook I’ve purchased through text to speech.

i am waiting for the day where i can use my own computer to generate high quality reading of any text so that i can listen to any book i like without waiting for an audiobook to be published.

Same. Feel uneasy having audio books on Audible or Apple Books. They have the power to remove them or block your account at anytime and the books are no longer in your possession. Highly unlikely ofc.

It's already possible, I'm working on the exact same thing.

Take a look at https://www.thorsten-voice.de/en/motivation-vision-english/. He is a german guy who is donating his voice to the community and provides a LJSpeech dataset (https://www.thorsten-voice.de/en/datasets-2/) as well as lot's of information how to use it (the quality is not as good as the commercial ones, it really is usable).

While his voice is not that bad, I would prefer my favorite german narrators to read my audiobooks, so I'm working on creating custom datasets from existing audiobooks that I own. These of course cannot be published because it would violate terms, but you can use ffmpeg to split an existing audio book by silence and transcribe it automatically using existing tools to create your own LJSpeech dataset.

There are also LJSpeech datasets for other languages - the format is pretty simple and can be used by anyone to train AI models.

The result is pretty impressive for "offline only".

that is interesting! can you describe how that transcription process works? if i have an audiobook and the corresponding ebook/pdf, isn't that already transcribed? or does transcription here mean something else?

i'd also be happy to use an existing voice (the english one from keith ito sounds pleasant enough) but i am confused how to use it to read a book. there is code for a model that learns to synthesize speech from the data: https://github.com/keithito/tacotron but i don't see how to get at the end result which i think would hopefully also be available somewhere so i can just use it to read something.

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