Audiobooks have been getting more and more popular in the past few years.
One service that many people recommend is Amazon’s Audible. But Audible subscriptions (and audiobooks in general) are expensive. So if you are wondering how to get free audible books, we’ve got you covered.
Listed below we have all the legit ways you can get free audiobooks from Audible.
There are many benefits to listening to audiobooks, one of which is that you can listen to books during times you wouldn’t get the chance to read. And if the audiobook narrator is particularly good at his or her job, it makes it even more interesting.
And with so many 100% free audiobook apps and websites, you are not limited!
In fact, audiobooks have become so popular that there’s an entire industry dedicated to buying and selling them. We even covered a few legit ways you can make money with Audible!
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When you are driving to work, cooking dinner, or cleaning your place, you can hear the stories you’ve been looking forward too while still being productive.
Table of Contents
How to Get Free Audible Books
Listed below are the various ways you can get books for free from Audible.
1. Get free Audible books with a 30-Day Free trial
- Free Audible Trial: Sign up here
Obviously, the best way to get legit Audible books for free is to sign up for a free trial. Their trial lasts 30 days and gets you one audiobook and two Audible originals.
Audible originals, if you were wondering, are books that are only available on their site.
Usually, they are narrated by professional voice actors.
Other features are:
- Exclusive guided wellness programs
- Ability to swap a book if you don’t like it
If you want to cancel your trial before being charged, don’t worry. Five days before the trial ends, they will email you so you can remember to cancel if you want!
You can also listen to the books on:
- Apple iPhone
- Apple Watch
- iPad
- Android
- Sonos
- Kindle
- Alexa devices
An Audible subscription costs $14.95 per month which kicks in after your initial 30-day free trial is over. So be sure to cancel if you don’t want to continue your membership.
2. Get free Audible books with Free Listen
- Audible Free Listen: List of free audiobooks
A lot of people don’t realize this but Audible actually has a selection of audiobooks available for you to listen too for free without a membership.
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This isn’t just an archive of classics, however. While most sites only give away public domain stories, these are actually recently released best sellers and audible originals.
You can listen to short stories that last only twenty minutes or a full story that lasts hours. There are lots of choices!
Who can say no to a free book? Best of all, you can listen to as many as you want without limit. Don’t like what you heard? Move onto another one that suits you. No limits!
One last thing to note, and my favorite feature of this site, is that they update their free list regularly. Come back whenever you’re done with a book and you’ll most likely find a new thing to check out.
3. Get free Audible books with Amazon Prime
- Sign up for Prime: This page has all the details.
Lately, more and more features have been added to Amazon Prime memberships. If you’re a member, you might not realize that you actually get a selection of Audible content for free.
First, you need the Audible app. Then, sign in with your Amazon account to quickly reach the Audible Channels section of the app. This will let you access all the free features that come with your Prime account.
You can get full-length audiobooks as well as podcasts produced exclusively for Audible members. There are also audio versions of articles from:
- The New York Times
- The Washington Post
- The Wall Street Journal
There are also lots of award-winning podcasts on the app.
Some of the shows you can find are:
- West Cork
- Damned Spot
- The Dark Web
- What Were You Thinking: Inside The Adolescent Brain
- Genius Dialogues
Other features of this service are that you can download content for free to listen to without interest and you can also adjust the narration speed to suit your needs. You can also set a timer for it to stop reading whenever you want.
4. Get free Audible books with Special Celebrating Events
- Special Events: Get your free copies here.
Did you know that April 23rd is World Book Day?
To celebrate reading and encourage it, Audible gives out three books for people to listen too, completely free!
Technically World Book Day lasts for just a day, but usually Audible lets people get these books for free for a whole week.
In 2019, they gave away:
- Moby Dick by Herman Melville
- Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne
- Emma by Jane Austen
Check back every year to see what three new books they are giving out!
5. Free Audible books on Reddit
Free trials and many other options still require you to enter your credit card details. Here’s a way to get free audible books without credit card.
There are a lot of sites where you can find coupons and promo codes for Audible books. It may be hard to find current and working coupons and discount codes, but they are out there, you just have to spend sometimes looking for ’em.
Personally, I like Reddit, specifically the r/FreeAudiobooks subreddit. This is a subreddit dedicated to finding and sharing free audiobooks including titles on Audible. So be sure to keep an eye on it so you don’t miss out on the latest available free audiobooks as well as coupons and promo codes.
6. Use Swagbucks
If you’re not using Swagbucks, you are missing out on basically free money.
Swagbucks is a huge and very popular reward site that pays you for taking surveys, playing games, watching videos, shopping and more. Everything you do on the site earns you points. You can then redeem your points for various prizes such as cash via PayPal, check and gift cards including Audible gift cards.
Sign up for Swagbucks (use this link to get $5 free sign up bonus), start earning points, then redeem your points for an Audible gift card and use it to download books for free.
Cheapest Audible Membership plan
Wanna subscribe to Audible but wish there was a cheaper plan?
Well, there is!
Audible has a somewhat secret Silver membership plan that they don’t advertise much which costs way less than the main Gold plan.
The standard (Gold) plan costs $14.95 per month and gives you 1 audiobook and 2 Audible originals each month.
With the Silver plan, however, you only pay $14.95 every two months which gets you 1 audiobook and 2 Audible originals every other month.
So if you like to listen to books but think 1 book every month is too much to get started with, the Silver plan is a great option.
They also have other plans including Platinum Monthly, Gold Annual and Platinum Annual that cost more but give you more credit for downloads.
Now, as I mentioned earlier, the company doesn’t advertise the Silver plan that much ( surprise, surprise, they want you to pay for the most expensive plan!) so it’s kind of tricky to even find and upgrade to it.
Here’s how to sign up for the Audible Silver membership plan:
Sign up for the free trial (if you haven’t already). Then log in to your account and go to Audible Customer Service page and click on My Account > Change or cancel my membership > Upgrade/downgrade my membership.
You can then connect with Support via chat, phone or email and ask them to switch you over.
Is Audible Worth the Money?
This is a question that comes up often when it comes to this site. Many people hesitate to subscribe to yet another service because there are so many companies out there who want monthly payments.
There is also a lot of concerns that Audible is too expensive. What many people don’t realize is that this company hires professional voice actors to do all of their reading for this. That way, you aren’t stuck listening to someone with poor audio quality or a bad reading voice.
That’s why testing out the service for free first is so important. You get to really see if it is going to be worth the money for you!
In my experience, Audible is going to be most worth it to people who:
- like to multitask
- want to read but don’t have time
- retain knowledge by audio rather than visual
- want their children to read more
Free Audible Alternatives
Audible might be the biggest and most well-known site where you can download and listen to audiobooks, but it certainly isn’t the only one. There are many other paid and free sites like it.
But since this post is about how to download books from Audible for free, we’re going to list a few 100% free alternatives.
On these sites below, you can download and listen to hundreds of thousands of titles from any genre you like, anytime and from anywhere.
These are just a few though. There are actually dozens of sites like these.
Also, do remember that your local library may have audiobooks that you can listen to for free. You can install a free app like Over Drive and use it to instantly search and listen to thousands of free audiobooks available at your local public library.
Final Thoughts
One final thing I’d like to add is that while searching for ways, I found a lot of obvious scams. The methods in this article are the only legitimate ways you can get Audible in 2020.
Be careful of any other sites that offer Audible memberships in exchange for personal information, because they might be scams. You should only trust real provides such as Amazon or Audible itself.
Now that you know how to get free audiobooks, all you need to do next is listen to your books!
Are there any books you recommend people listen too? Let us and our readers know in the comments below.
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