The Library
Hundreds of classic audiobooks, free to stream or download. All public domain, all the time.
Where the books come from
Powered by Project Gutenberg
📖 What is Project Gutenberg?
Project Gutenberg is a volunteer-run digital library that has been digitizing books since 1971 — the oldest digital library in the world. It contains over 70,000 books in its catalog, all of which are in the public domain in the United States.
In the US, works published before January 1, 1928 are in the public domain — which means any book published through 1927 is free to reproduce, distribute, and adapt without permission or royalties. This includes almost all of the Western literary canon: every Jane Austen novel, every Dickens, every Shakespeare, every Tolstoy, Homer, Dante, and most of the great American literature of the 19th and early 20th century.
Listen Unbound selects titles from the Gutenberg catalog based on quality of the source text, literary merit, and likely listener interest. Not every Gutenberg book is suitable for audiobook narration — we screen for clean, well-formatted text and books that hold up to sustained audio listening.
Once a title is selected, we run it through a preprocessing pipeline that detects and labels chapters, removes front matter that doesn't belong in narration (table of contents, publisher colophon, footnote markers), and cleans up OCR artifacts from the scanning process. The cleaned text is then sent through the Pocket TTS engine to generate chapter-level audio files, which are stored and streamed from AWS S3.
The entire pipeline — from Gutenberg source to playable audiobook — takes about 30 to 90 minutes per book, depending on length. We're continuously adding new titles as the pipeline runs.
📚 Classic Novels
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1818
Frankenstein
The original science fiction novel, in which Victor Frankenstein creates life and then abandons his creation — setting off a chain of consequences that destroys everything he loves. A meditation on ambition, responsibility, and what it means to be human.
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1851
Moby Dick
Captain Ahab's obsessive hunt for the white whale that took his leg — one of the great American novels, full of philosophical asides, encyclopedic whale lore, and a terrifying climax. Often called the greatest American novel ever written.
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1859
A Tale of Two Cities
Set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, Dickens's most popular novel follows characters in London and Paris whose fates become intertwined. Opens with one of the most famous lines in English literature.
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1866
Crime and Punishment
A young student in St. Petersburg convinces himself that he has the right to commit murder for a greater good — and then spends the novel being torn apart by guilt. One of the deepest psychological portraits in all of fiction.
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1869
War and Peace
The sweeping story of five aristocratic Russian families during the Napoleonic Wars. Enormous in scope but surprisingly readable, with some of the most vividly drawn characters in world literature.
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1890
The Picture of Dorian Gray
A beautiful young man makes a Faustian bargain: his portrait ages while he stays young. As Dorian sinks into hedonism and corruption, the painting grows monstrous. Wilde's only novel — witty, dark, and still unsettling.
🗺 Adventure
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1719
Robinson Crusoe
Often called the first English novel, this is the story of a man stranded alone on a tropical island for 28 years. It invented the survival genre and has never gone out of print.
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1872
Around the World in Eighty Days
Phileas Fogg bets his entire fortune that he can circumnavigate the globe in 80 days. A propulsive, episodic adventure that made the world feel small and travel feel possible.
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1883
Treasure Island
Jim Hawkins, a pirate map, Long John Silver, and a Caribbean island full of buried gold. The template for nearly every adventure story that followed it.
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1884
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Huck Finn and the escaped slave Jim float down the Mississippi on a raft, encountering con men, feuding families, and moral dilemmas along the way. Hemingway said all American literature comes from this book.
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1906
The Jungle Book
Mowgli's adventures in the Indian jungle, raised by wolves and befriended by Baloo and Bagheera. Far darker and richer than the Disney adaptation — these are real stories, not just animal fables.
👻 Horror & Gothic
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1886
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
A respectable London doctor develops a potion that releases his darker nature in the form of the murderous Mr Hyde. A tight, fast novella that invented a cultural archetype and still delivers genuine dread.
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1897
Dracula
Told entirely through letters, diary entries, and newspaper clippings, Stoker's novel follows a group of English friends as they discover and confront a vampire count from Transylvania. Still genuinely eerie and surprisingly modern in its epistolary structure.
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1896
The Island of Doctor Moreau
A shipwrecked man washes ashore on an island where a disgraced scientist is surgically transforming animals into human-like beings. One of Wells's most disturbing books — a horror story about the ethics of science.
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1920
The Haunting of Hill House
Not yet available — not in the public domain. We've listed this as a placeholder for a commonly requested title.
💕 Romance & Social Fiction
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1813
Pride and Prejudice
Elizabeth Bennet and the proud Mr Darcy navigate the social complexities of Regency England. The most beloved novel in English literature, with dialogue that crackles after 200 years.
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1811
Sense and Sensibility
Two sisters — the impulsive Marianne and the restrained Elinor — navigate love and heartbreak in Austen's first published novel. A close character study wrapped in a social comedy.
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1847
Jane Eyre
An orphaned girl becomes a governess at a mysterious manor, falls in love with her brooding employer, and discovers a terrible secret locked in the attic. One of the great psychological novels of the 19th century.
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1847
Wuthering Heights
The obsessive, destructive love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, spanning two generations on the Yorkshire moors. Dark, savage, and unlike anything else in English literature.
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1848
Vanity Fair
The rise and fall of Becky Sharp, a scheming social climber in Regency England — one of the great anti-heroines of Victorian fiction. A satirical panorama of English society at its most hypocritical.
🧠 Philosophy & Essays
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~180 AD
Meditations
Private journal entries by a Roman emperor — never intended for publication. A practical guide to Stoic philosophy: how to face difficulty, control your reactions, and find meaning in work. One of the most influential books ever written.
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~800 BC
The Odyssey
Odysseus's decade-long journey home from the Trojan War, encountering Cyclopes, Sirens, Circe, and the land of the dead along the way. The foundational Western adventure story, still gripping after three millennia.
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1841
Essays: First Series
Twelve essays including "Self-Reliance," "Compensation," and "The Over-Soul." Emerson's most influential work — the philosophical foundation of American individualism and transcendentalism.
More titles added regularly
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