Guide

Project Gutenberg and audiobooks: what is free?

What Project Gutenberg provides, how it connects to free audio, and where the narration actually lives.

Gutenberg is primarily a text library

Project Gutenberg distributes public-domain ebooks. It is not an audiobook publisher. When a title has an audio version, the recording usually comes from LibriVox or another volunteer project.

Use the text as a companion

A Gutenberg text can help with names, footnotes, and passages that are hard to hear. Book Search Party links to Gutenberg when a matching text exists.

Check the edition

Public-domain status and editions vary by country. Gutenberg pages include license information and warnings for non-US readers.

Do not confuse a text link with an audio link

A Gutenberg result is labeled as text. The audio buttons point to LibriVox, Internet Archive, or Loyal Books.