“If Elizabeth Klett is not an actress, she may have missed her calling,” says a five-star review of the audiobook of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Another reviewer points out that Elizabeth might do the best British accent among all Americans.

She is part of a group of “grocery list readers” according to a fan in a Facebook group: “Those are readers who could read a grocery list *or even the US Tax Code* and I will listen.”

Elizabeth Klett is no ordinary voice actress. Many of her audiobooks of classics like Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen are freely available online. 

Starting in the 1930s as phonograph “talking books” for visually impaired people in the US, audiobooks have been around for a while. They wouldn’t take off until the MP3 came around. With 30 to 60 minutes of playtime per side, lengthy book readings on cassette tapes weren’t as widespread as audiobooks are now. A recording of the bible would take between 52 and 104 tapes. Where would you even put them?

While audiobook sales were responsible for 1.96% of the US book trade in 2010, this figure had more than quadrupled to 8.3% by 2020. The National Literacy Trust in the UK found that 44.3% of UK adults had listened to an audiobook in 2021, while 27.1% said they were listening to audiobooks at least once a week. Almost half of respondents said they liked audiobooks because it allowed them to carry out other tasks. One-fifth reported that the medium gave them access to stories their eyesight prevented them from reading.

Print books still reign supreme. But with 19% of book sales worldwide attributed to e-books and with audiobooks on the rise, there’s no denying that there are more ways to enjoy a read than through a trusty paperback. Audiobook services are popping up left and right, including Amazon’s Audible, Sweden-based company Storytel, and Libro.fm, an online service that allows you to purchase audiobooks through your local bookshop. 

Audiobooks don’t come cheap, however. The added costs of hiring voice actors, a studio, and audio editors used to add up to twice the cover price of a print version. That is, before audiobook subscription services, based on the model of Netflix and Spotify, came around. 

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So, how come grocery list reader Elizabeth, so lauded in the reviews, is sharing her recordings for free? 

Elizabeth volunteers at LibriVox, an organisation where she and others record themselves for their own and other people’s pleasure. The kicker? You are not guilty of internet piracy by downloading their audiobooks, because all the titles they read are in the public domain.

Books, like any creative work, have copyrights. You are not allowed to copy or make derivative works, like audio recordings, without permission. Leaf through the first pages of any book and it will say something like “No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means.” Copyright protects people’s work as their intellectual property against theft or misuse by others. 

But copyright has an expiration date. When it expires depends on where you are, but in the US—where LibriVox is founded— the rule of thumb is that everything published before 1923 is in the public domain. Thousands of titles that were published after 1923 are in the public domain too, but identifying their status may require some legal sleuthing. Databases like the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg offer millions of digitised books in the public domain, providing an endless treasure trove to choose from.

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By becoming a LibriVox volunteer, readers agree that their recordings will be in the public domain also. This means that anyone is allowed to listen to the recordings for free, but also, according to the Librivox website, to “sell them (for instance on ebay), broadcast them, put them in commercials, play them at political rallies, chop them up, remix them, make music recordings of them.” 

This can lead to awkward encounters, like when somebody decided to play a LibriVox recording of Darwin’s The Origin Of Species in the background of a porn flick. A former volunteer pointed out to me that their audiobooks were being sold under another name and that their voice had been used to train AI speech software. By putting your work in the public domain, you waive your copyright protecting it. 

There are other strategies to make your work freely available. Creative Commons licences, for example, allow creators to share their work freely under conditions they choose, like with attribution only. But LibriVox uses the public domain only.

Listeners, however, are grateful to have a pick out of the thousands of recordings LibriVox offers on their website and app. Which leaves unanswered why volunteers are spending hours upon hours to record and edit their voices without getting paid. I got in touch with Elizabeth Klett to ask what moved her to become a reader herself.

“I wanted to share some of my favourite literary works that hadn’t yet been recorded,” Elizabeth says. She joined LibriVox in 2007 after hearing some of their recordings in a literature podcast. “As an English professor, I have taught many of the works that I recorded. I even published a scholarly essay on some Shakespeare recordings I did for LibriVox.” What started as a volunteering stint with LibriVox would fundamentally change her career.

“My first book was Carmilla by J.S. LeFanu, which is a favorite Victorian novella of mine that I had read a number of times. I intentionally chose a shorter book to start with.” Elizabeth would go on to record lengthier titles including the 474-page Jane Austen novel Emma with a playtime of 14 hours and 53 minutes.

When the founder of LibriVox, Hugh McGuire, asked Elizabeth to read for another project in 2011, she landed her first paid gig as a professional narrator. With her already impressive back catalogue, other companies took notice as she eased into her new job description as an “audiobook narrator and voice artist”.

Recording entire books takes a lot of time alone, locked away in a studio (or bedroom) to avoid background noise. “Recording an audiobook, depending on the length, can feel a bit like a marathon. You have to take it a little bit at a time, or it can feel overwhelming,” Elizabeth explains. But like many volunteer-run organisations, LibriVox has a thriving community. The lively forum on their website is where readers talk, help each other out, and suggest books to be read. 

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Books can be recorded by multiple people doing a chapter each, or by one person in their entirety, called a “solo”. Book coordinators manage the volunteers who will read parts of the book, and proof listeners give the entire book a listen before it is released to the public. It takes more than a good voice to get this show on the road. Volunteering takes all kinds of forms, including technical or moral support on the forum, dissemination, and designing cover visuals for the stories.

The LibriVox forum looks like it hasn’t changed since it went online in 2006, its web 1.0 looks and structure breathing nostalgia. Emoticons—the precursors of emoji—are alive and well in this online space, and there are no algorithms steering you along. Everything that has ever been posted is still present and instantly accessible. The board for completed projects contains almost 1.5 million posts. In the “off-topic section” of the forum, a game where people rhyme a short phrase to the previous post has been going on since 2013.

Although the web 1.0 aesthetic has caught Gen Z’s attention, active forums like LibriVox’s show that they are anything but a remnant from the past. Without pictures, video content, influencers, or even a like button, all people do is talk with each other. It feels less anonymous than your average Reddit thread, even if you don’t know who’s behind the screenname dreamyreads85. The same handles pop up over a period of years, creating an air of familiarity (and an absence of trolling) that makes you wonder what changed the rest of the internet. And how much longer forums like these will last. 

No major updates shuffle the entire user interface around; no executive decisions ever radically change the fabric of the platform. LibriVox exudes a stability not many online platforms can boast, ensuring an ever-increasing output of free audiobooks for over 16 years. 

As long as people continue to believe in the concept, they are invited to contribute their voice. A post from 2008 will help you on your merry way without needing anyone’s permission.  And everybody else is invited to enjoy the audiobooks created in the process. 

Just don’t play The Origin of Species in the background while filming a sex tape—even if you legally can.