A retired engineer. A wife with failing eyesight. Everyone saying it couldn't be done for free. Seven months later — here it is.
My wife has failing eyesight. Reading a book became harder and harder. The audiobook services that existed either cost money we didn't want to spend on something that should be free, required sign-ups, or pushed adverts between chapters of Pride and Prejudice.
The books themselves are free. They've been free for over a hundred years — public domain classics, copyright expired, belonging to everyone. The idea that someone should charge you to listen to them never sat right with me.
So I decided to build something. My wife told me I couldn't do it for free. I am a retired engineer. That was the wrong thing to say.
"Books should always be free. No matter where you are in the world."
— Scott, Founder, Houghton-Le-Spring, England
It took seven months of evenings and weekends. Hours of work figuring out text-to-speech, building the streaming system, sourcing 70,000 public domain titles, getting the audio to sound like a real narrator rather than a robot reading a spreadsheet.
The first prototype ran on free WiFi. That caused its own nightmares — some free WiFi hotspots block unknown domains outright. The fix cost £10: a proper .com domain so the site works on any free WiFi, anywhere. That is the only money ever spent on this project.
No cloud bills. No hosting fees. No subscription service. A Windows PC in a living room in the north of England, running 24 hours a day, serving audiobooks to visitors in 70+ countries. Every penny of cost: £10.
Every major character gets their own distinct AI voice. In Alice in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter doesn't sound like the Queen of Hearts. The Cheshire Cat has its own voice. The White Rabbit has another. In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge's warm-hearted nephew Fred is a completely different voice to the cold, measured Ghost of Christmas Past.
Most free audiobook sites use a single narrator throughout. Even LibriVox — excellent as it is — gives you one voice per book. Here, the books sound like a cast. A production. Not a person reading at a desk.
We do this for free. That was the whole point.
We have been working to improve it ever since. French classics narrated in French. Spanish classics in Spanish. Hindi, Russian, Dutch, German, Italian, Portuguese. Children's classics. The same deal everywhere: no sign-up, no subscription, no adverts.
She uses it every day.
This is a vanity project. It was built to prove it could be done. It stays free because that was always the point. The books are public domain — they belong to everyone. So does this site.
If you'd like to help keep the server running, there's a Ko-fi link on the homepage. No obligation. Never will be.