Listen to Project Gutenberg Books

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.