Project Gutenberg has been publishing free, public-domain ebooks since 1971, and its library runs to tens of thousands of titles, everything from classic novels to old reference works, all free of copyright and free of cost. What a lot of people do not realize is how little stands between "found a book on Gutenberg" and "listening to it as an audiobook." Here is the whole process, plus the Gutenberg's own audiobook effort worth knowing about first.
First, check if it already has an audiobook
Before doing anything yourself, it is worth checking whether the specific book you want is already part of Project Gutenberg's Open Audiobook Collection, a 2023 collaboration between Project Gutenberg, Microsoft and MIT that produced roughly 5,000 titles as ready-made synthetic-voice audiobooks, built with Microsoft's neural text to speech technology and distributed as MP3s through Gutenberg's own site and platforms like the Internet Archive and various podcast apps. If your book is in that collection already, it is a genuinely good, free option with no extra steps needed, and it is worth trying first. TIME magazine named the project one of the best inventions of 2023, which gives a sense of how seriously it was received.
Where this guide is useful is for the much larger number of Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks titles that are not part of that specific collection, or for when you want a different voice, narration style, or more control than a fixed pre-made recording gives you.
Step 1: Download the EPUB
Go to Project Gutenberg or Standard Ebooks and find the book you want. Standard Ebooks is worth knowing about specifically because it takes the same public-domain texts Gutenberg hosts and produces carefully formatted, proofread new editions, released in EPUB along with other formats, which can make for a cleaner starting file than an older plain-text scan. Either source works. Download the EPUB file to your device.
Do not worry about converting the file to anything else first. Both PDF and EPUB are supported directly.
Step 2: Upload it
Upload the EPUB file. ReadLoud accepts files up to 40 MB and 900,000 characters, which comfortably covers almost any novel, even a long one. Because it reads the EPUB's own structure, chapters keep their boundaries rather than running together into one undifferentiated block of text, so you can jump to a specific chapter later rather than scrubbing through hours of audio to find your place.
Step 3: Pick the Narrator engine
For fiction specifically, the Narrator engine is worth choosing deliberately. It is built on Google's Chirp 3 HD voices, tuned for audiobook-style delivery across 50 or more languages and locales, rather than the quicker, more neutral tone that suits a work document or a news article. The Gemini-based engines, Fast, Studio, and the preview Gemini 3.1 engine, also support a delivery style, and storyteller is worth trying on fiction specifically if you want to compare it against Narrator, since taste in narration voice is genuinely personal. Preview any voice in the picker before committing to it for the whole book.
Step 4: Press play, and only pay for what you actually listen to
Nothing is generated until you press play. From there, audio for the next stretch of the book generates ahead of you as you listen, and pauses when you pause, so you are never waiting on the whole book to finish processing before you can start. Everything that does get generated is cached permanently, so going back to re-hear a chapter, or picking the book back up next month, costs nothing the second time.
This matters for the actual cost of a full novel. A typical 300-page book runs to roughly 10 hours of audio, using ReadLoud's own rule of thumb. On the largest, 1,000-minute Binge pack at $99, the rate works out to under 10 cents a minute, which is under $6 an hour, well below what a comparable commercial audiobook subscription costs per title. And because generation only happens for the parts you actually play, if you start a book and set it aside after three chapters, you have only paid for three chapters' worth of audio, not the whole book upfront. If you decide later to finish it, the parts you already heard are still there, cached and free to replay.
Step 5: Download the finished MP3
Once a document has fully generated, whether that took one sitting or several weeks of reading a chapter at a time, you can download it as a single MP3 file. That gives you an offline copy of the whole audiobook you made, playable anywhere, which is a genuinely nice way to end up with a personal audiobook of a book that never had a commercial one made.
Where this fits next to Audible
It is worth being direct about what this is and is not. This process turns a public-domain text into a synthetic-voice reading, not a professionally narrated performance the way a commercial audiobook from a service like Audible is. For books that already exist as well produced commercial audiobooks, and where a human narrator's performance is part of the appeal, Audible remains the better choice, and our comparison of ReadLoud and Audible goes into that trade-off directly. What this guide solves is a different, real gap: the enormous number of public-domain books that will never get a commercial audiobook treatment, classics, older nonfiction, obscure titles, made listenable for a few dollars instead of staying unread on a shelf or a device.
What else this works for
The same steps apply to anything else you have as a DRM-free EPUB, not just public-domain classics: your own writing, a book you bought DRM-free from a publisher that offers that option, or any other file type ReadLoud supports. Our EPUB to audiobook guide covers the general process in more detail, and our notes on Kindle text to speech explain why this specific route does not work for books still locked inside a Kindle or Audible file.
Trying it
Pick a public-domain classic you have always meant to get to, download the EPUB from Gutenberg or Standard Ebooks, and try the first minutes free with no account needed. If it holds up over a full chapter, check current pack pricing before starting the whole book.