The short answer
Project Gutenberg is a free, volunteer-run library of public-domain ebooks: tens of thousands of titles, no account, no DRM, downloadable as EPUB, Kindle files, HTML, or plain text. The books are free to read wherever their copyright has expired, which depends on your country. And because the files are DRM-free, you can also listen to any of them with a text-to-speech app.
What Project Gutenberg is
Project Gutenberg started in 1971, when Michael Hart typed the US Declaration of Independence into a university computer and made it available to anyone. That makes it the oldest digital library, older than the web itself. Today it's a nonprofit funded by donations. Volunteers scan, transcribe, and proofread books page by page, much of it through the Distributed Proofreaders project, before each title is published.
The result is not a scan of old pages but clean, corrected text. That matters for listening: a Gutenberg EPUB has real chapters and real paragraphs, which is exactly what a voice needs to sound natural.
What "public domain" means, and why it depends on where you live
A book enters the public domain when its copyright expires. From then on, anyone can copy, share, translate, or adapt it. The catch is that the length of copyright isn't the same everywhere.
- In the United States, the rules mostly depend on the publication date. Works published more than 95 years ago are generally in the public domain, and each January another year's worth of books joins them.
- In many other countries, including the European Union and the United Kingdom, copyright lasts for the author's life plus 70 years. Some countries use different terms.
Project Gutenberg operates under US law. So a novel published in the 1920s by an author who died in the 1960s can be public domain in the US while still protected in countries that count from the author's death. The reverse also happens. Every Gutenberg ebook carries a notice asking readers outside the United States to check the laws of their own country before using it.
Translations add a second layer: a translator holds a copyright of their own. A 19th-century novel can be public domain while a modern translation of it is not. That's why the translations you'll find on Gutenberg are usually old ones. This is general information, not legal advice; when in doubt, check your local rules.
How to find good books on Project Gutenberg
Browse by language
English dominates the collection. French, German, Finnish, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese have substantial shelves, and many other languages have smaller ones. Filtering by language is the fastest way to find classics in your native language or in one you're learning.
Browse by subject and bookshelf
Each book is tagged with library subject headings, and volunteers maintain themed bookshelves: science fiction, detective fiction, children's literature, philosophy, history, and many more. Bookshelves are a better starting point than search when you don't know what you want.
Use the popularity lists
Project Gutenberg publishes its most downloaded books over the last day, week, and month. It's a reliable list of the classics people actually finish, and a good way to discover titles you'd forgotten were free.
Pick the right edition
Popular books often exist in several editions. Long works sometimes appear both as a complete edition and as separate volumes; for listening, the complete edition saves you from importing five files. Versions "with images" only matter if you also want to look at the illustrations.
Classics to start with, by genre
Mystery
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle: short stories, an easy first listen.
- The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins: told by several narrators, which suits audio well.
- The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie: Hercule Poirot's first case.
Science fiction and horror
- The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells.
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
- Dracula by Bram Stoker: letters and diary entries that sound great read aloud.
- Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson: short enough for an evening or two.
Adventure
- Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.
- The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas: long, and worth every hour.
- Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne.
Love, family, and society
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.
- Middlemarch by George Eliot: demanding on the page, very rewarding by ear.
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.
Russian classics in translation
- Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.
Non-fiction and philosophy
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.
- The Art of War by Sun Tzu.
- Walden by Henry David Thoreau.
- On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.
Children and family listening
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
- The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.
- Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery.
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.
In other languages
Les Misérables and Madame Bovary in French, Don Quijote in Spanish, Die Verwandlung in German, the Divina Commedia in Italian, Max Havelaar in Dutch. Listening to a classic in its original language with a native voice is a good way to practice; see learning a language with books.
How to listen to Project Gutenberg books in VocaRead
VocaRead has the Project Gutenberg catalogue built in, so there's nothing to download from a browser first.
- Open the built-in Project Gutenberg catalogue from VocaRead's import options.
- Search by title, author, language, or subject.
- Tap a book to add it to your library.
- Choose a voice in the book's language. Voices are downloaded once; after that, everything runs offline on the device.
- Press play. VocaRead detects where the actual text begins in most books, so you start at the first chapter, not at the front matter.
Already downloaded EPUBs from Gutenberg's website? Share them to VocaRead from Files or Safari, as described in our guide to listening to EPUB books. Every book includes 90 minutes of free listening, enough to find out whether a voice and a story work for you.
Tips for listening to old books
Choose your translation deliberately
Public-domain translations are often a century old: Victorian vocabulary, sometimes trimmed passages. If one feels stiff, look for another. Gutenberg sometimes has several translations of the same work; Homer's Iliad, for example, is available in more than one English version, from Alexander Pope's verse to Samuel Butler's prose.
Expect archaic spelling and long sentences
"To-day", "connexion", "shew", "thou art": older texts keep spellings and forms that are no longer current. Modern neural voices handle most of them, but dense 19th-century prose can be easier at a slightly slower speed. VocaRead goes from 0.5x to 2.0x, set per book.
Teach the voice your characters' names
Classic novels are full of names no voice has been trained on: Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, Hermione in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, half the Greek pantheon. Long-press a word to set how it should be pronounced; the rule is saved per language, applies to every book, and syncs through iCloud. Details in how to fix mispronounced names.
Skip the extras
Gutenberg texts can include transcriber's notes, footnotes, and the Project Gutenberg license at the end. Use the chapter list to jump past what you don't want to hear.
Let long classics fit your days
A big Russian novel is a long commitment. The sleep timer can stop at the end of a chapter, and each book keeps its exact position, so you can keep several classics going at once. Our article on falling asleep to books has more ideas.
Frequently asked questions
Is Project Gutenberg legal?
Yes. It's a long-running nonprofit that publishes books in the public domain under US law. Outside the United States, check whether a given book is also public domain in your country.
Are the books really free?
Yes. There's no account, no subscription, and no DRM. The project is funded by donations.
How many books does Project Gutenberg have?
Tens of thousands, and volunteers keep adding more. The collection is strongest in English, with substantial shelves in several other languages.
Why can't I find a recent bestseller?
Because it's still under copyright. Project Gutenberg only publishes works that are in the public domain in the US, which mostly means books that are many decades old.
Can I listen to Gutenberg books offline?
Yes. Once a book is in your VocaRead library and its voice is downloaded, playback needs no connection.
To turn the classics you never got around to into listening, get VocaRead on the App Store. Each book includes 90 minutes of free listening, and Premium is a one-time purchase, with no subscription.