Gutenberg's own site has no read-aloud button, and only about 5,000 of its 70,000+ books have an audiobook anywhere. Press play below to hear the opening of Pride and Prejudice, then open the real book and keep going.
Runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded
Loading voices…
This demo is the floor, not the ceiling
It uses your device's built-in voices on short passages. The extension and apps add natural AI voices, unlimited-length documents, Kindle Cloud Reader support, synced highlighting on live webpages, and cross-language Read & Explain.
Project Gutenberg does not have a read-aloud button on its website. It does have free audiobooks for roughly 5,000 of its titles — AI-narrated by Microsoft and MIT researchers in 2023 — but those are distributed through the Internet Archive, Spotify and podcast apps rather than played on gutenberg.org. The collection holds more than 70,000 books, so the great majority have no audio of any kind. That gap is the whole point of this page: Gutenberg publishes every book as plain, well-structured HTML with no DRM and no reader app in the way, which is the easiest possible material to read aloud — so essentially the entire catalogue works. Open a book's "Read this book online: HTML" edition in Chrome or Edge, press CastReader, and it reads from where you are with the current paragraph highlighted and your position kept between sessions.
What people ask before installing
Yes — the player above is already loaded with the opening of Pride and Prejudice and runs entirely in your browser, with no account and nothing uploaded. It uses your device's own voices, which is the floor of what this does. To hear it on the real book with paragraph highlighting and your position kept, open Gutenberg's HTML edition of Pride and Prejudice (ebook #1342) and press the extension.
Not on the website. There is no read-aloud control on gutenberg.org — the books are plain HTML pages meant for reading. Listening takes a browser reader such as CastReader, or your browser's own read-aloud mode.
For some titles, yes. In 2023 Microsoft and MIT researchers generated AI-narrated audiobooks for roughly 5,000 Gutenberg books, and those are free. They are hosted on the Internet Archive and syndicated to Spotify and podcast apps rather than played on Gutenberg itself. With more than 70,000 books in the collection, most titles are not covered.
Essentially all of them, in the HTML edition. Gutenberg is unusually consistent — every title is published as clean semantic HTML with no DRM, no pagination tricks and no app wrapper, so there is no per-book setup and nothing to configure. That is the opposite of a store library, where each platform has to be handled separately.
Search the title on the Internet Archive or in your podcast app before installing anything. If it is one of the 5,000, that recording is free and already made — use it. This page is for the other case, which is the more common one.
LibriVox is human-narrated, volunteer-recorded, and also free — a different and often better listen when a good reader recorded your book. Coverage is uneven and quality varies by narrator, which is exactly what you would expect from volunteers. Check LibriVox first for well-known classics; fall back to reading the page aloud for everything else.
Open the book's "Read this book online: HTML" version rather than downloading an EPUB, then press CastReader. It reads the chapter text with the paragraph highlighted, and remembers where you stopped — which matters when the book runs 300 pages.
For browser listening, the HTML version. It is one long, clean page with no DRM and no app in the way. If you would rather listen on a phone, the EPUB downloads free and opens in the CastReader app for iPhone, iPad and Android.
Free to start, no account. Playback speeds above 1.25x and premium voices are CastReader Pro features. Gutenberg's books are free because they are in the public domain.
Gutenberg files open with a licence block and often close with transcriber's notes. Start playback from the first line of the actual text rather than the top of the page, or select the chapter you want and read the selection.
Listening to books you already own, without converting files
The DRM-safe route for Kindle library books
Fanfiction that will never have an audiobook edition
Papers and manuals read in the right column order
Read any webpage aloud for free
Download the CastReader app for DRM-free EPUB import and supported mobile reading workflows.
Hard numbers — not vibes — from authoritative sources
$2.22 billion
US audiobook sales in 2024, up 13% year-over-year (Publishers Weekly / Audio Publishers Association)
Source →51%
of US adults have listened to an audiobook in 2025 — roughly 134 million people (APA Consumer Survey 2025)
Source →2.2 billion
people globally with near- or far-vision impairment (WHO Fact Sheet, 2024). TTS is the primary access path for digital reading content.
Source →78%
of audiobook listeners multitask while listening — commute, chores, exercise (Audiolibrix Great Audiobook Survey, 2024)
Source →27.2 minutes
average single-trip US commute in 2024, up from 26.8 (US Census ACS via Statista). That's nearly an hour each day of audio-only time.
Source →effect size 0.35
measured comprehension lift from TTS for reading-disabled students across 22 studies (Wood, Moxley, Tighe & Wagner, Journal of Learning Disabilities, 2018)
Source →15.5 million
US adults with ADHD per CDC 2024 — about half diagnosed in adulthood (CDC MMWR, October 2024)
Source →Every Chrome Web Store review below is verifiable at the link in each card. We don't hide negative feedback — we answer it within 24 hours.
“This is 1 of the best TTS and its smooth. If this is truly free i'll keep this 100%. Every other TTS says its free but has a secret. They interrupt or they just say better ai voices pay. But i like this voice. I've tried loads and this is 1 of the best ones that actually says free.”
“Works perfectly on vivaldi. One suggestion though. I wish it had a play button appear next to a paragraph when we hover over it. Just like in the case of speechify.”
“Extremely user friendly short keys. Placed forward backward and speed up down as Natural as it could be. Voices are great and smooth. I would recommend it over many hyped products.”
“At the very least it's better than many paid TTS models. Still not as good as ElevenReader or LAP, but maybe the best free model for TTS.”
“So glad I can finally switch voices! The default was fine but I found one I actually enjoy listening to for hours. Small thing, huge difference.”
“Best one i found, user friendly, and great voice over.”
“ChatGPT's long answers are finally listenable. Let it generate while I listen — doubles my productivity. Love the inline button next to each response.”
“I tried using this add-on to listen to an ebook on the O'Reilly learning platform, and it works smoothly. However, it always restarts from the first paragraph whenever I scroll or select a different paragraph. Please consider adding a bookmark or checkpoint feature so users can mark where the reading should begin.”
↪ Founder reply
Replied by CastReader founder Yan Xu within 48 hours: acknowledged the issue, shipped a bookmark feature in the following release. Reviewer's verbatim feedback drove the v1.2 roadmap.
“Need to highlight text and select it.”
“Hard to select text.”
↪ Founder reply
Replied by CastReader founder Yan Xu within 24 hours: apologized, asked which site/browser the issue occurred on, provided a workaround using the keyboard shortcut, and offered direct support at support@castreader.com.
We re-test, re-write, and ship continuously. Every entry has a real date.
Rewrote landing pages with verbatim Chrome Web Store testimonials, real audiobook market data, and tested-12-extensions methodology. Every claim now has a sourceable link.
CastReader provides native apps for iPhone and Android; Android downloads are available directly from Google Play.
Wrote up the OCR pipeline: how CastReader handles Amazon's 184 random font alphabets and 361 unique glyphs per Kindle book. Shared in dev.to.
The phone app flow now has its own landing page for bookshelf sync, Read Aloud, synced highlighting, auto-scroll, background playback, and resume progress.
Ranked #10 in Daily, 99 upvotes, 4 community comments shaped the v1.2 roadmap.
Switched from older TTS engines to Kokoro neural voices. User reviews shifted from 'usable but robotic' to 'enjoy listening for hours' (verbatim from review by patrick chiang).
OCR success rate improved from 78% to 89% on English-language Kindle books. Multi-column page detection added for academic PDFs.
I built CastReader because I owned hundreds of Kindle books and couldn't listen to them on my morning runs without buying separate Audible copies. The technical problem — Amazon's Cloud Reader font encryption — turned out to be solvable with OCR. The product problem — making it actually pleasant across phones, desktops, and 9 supported languages — took two years of iteration. We're a small team. I answer every Chrome Web Store review personally (see testimonials above — including the 3-star and 1-star ones). If something's broken or missing, email support@castreader.com.
— Yan Xu, founder
Last reviewed: · CastReader Team — reviewed against 2025 testing data
Gutenberg's HTML edition of Pride and Prejudice is one clean page, free, and needs no account. Press play and see how an hour of it holds up.
For local PDF, DOCX, TXT, Markdown, and images, plus supported webpages and browser-based readers. Local EPUB import is not available.
For DRM-free EPUBs and mobile reading on iPhone, iPad, and Android.
Official App Store and Google Play downloads · Chrome, Edge, and Firefox extensions