5 Best Free Audiobooks and ebooks services (June 2023)

30 day trial

What we like

• You can listen as much as you want, during your trial
• Massive selection of free audiobooks and ebooks. 100,000 audiobooks, and 1,300,000 ebooks are available.

What we don’t like

• Not all audiobooks and ebooks that Kobo sells, are available as part of Kobo Plus. Nevertheless, as mentioned above you have access to 100k audiobooks and 1.3m ebooks!

Important

• To get access to both audiobooks and ebooks during your 30 day trial, you need to pick the ‘Kobo Plus Read & Listen’ option
• This is a genuine completely free trial, but they do ask for your payment details. Remember to correctly cancel in accordance with their terms & conditions, if you only want the free trial.

30 day trial

What we like

• Massive selection of audiobooks and ebooks.

What we don’t like

• Unusually for a streaming service it’s not unlimited use – you can get upto 100 hours during the 30 days, depending on which option you pick

Important

• Pick the ‘Premium’ plan if you want the most hours of use during your free trial
• This is a genuine completely free trial, but they do ask for your payment details. Remember to correctly cancel in accordance with their terms & conditions, if you only want the free trial.

30 day trial

What we like

• Massive selection of free audiobooks, including exclusives

Important

• This is a genuine completely free trial, but they do ask for your payment details. Remember to correctly cancel in accordance with their terms & conditions, if you only want the free trial.

Free downloadable audiobooks to keep

What we like

• A massive and growing library of audiobooks (currently 18,000+) that are in the public domain
• Volunteers read and record these audiobooks, and you can contribute too

What we don’t like

• Recordings are not always of the same quality as professional audiobooks, for example lower audio quality, and background noises.
• Some audiobooks are read by multiple readers, which some people may not like (others may actually think this is great).

Free downloadable ebooks to keep

What we like

• Named after Johannes Gutenberg, whose work in the field of printing technology, contributed to the massive availability of books. Project Gutenberg uses volunteers to digitise and archive out public domain works.
• Founded in 1971, they currently have over 70,000 documents to download

What we don’t like

• ebooks are not always of the same quality as professional ebooks, for example not illustrated, or not as beautifully presented (e.g. fonts used)