Show HN: Searchable library of free audiobooks

[libridev]

https://booksearch.party/

I noticed that many websites offering free audiobooks tend to have clunky search functionality, making it harder to find what you're looking for. To address this, I’ve created a site that aggregates audiobooks from multiple platforms—complete with book reviews and ratings—making it easier to discover and explore new titles.

At the moment, I've included audiobooks from popular sources like Librivox, Project Gutenberg, and Lit2Go.

I'm open to suggestions on additional free audiobook sources I could integrate into the site to expand the collection!

[araes]

The discover part at least seems to work acceptably. Stumbled across the Lang's Fairy Books from the late 1800's and early 1900's that collected ~800 stories and 150 poem about mythology, folklore, and fairy tales from all over the Earth. Never knew they existed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Langs%27_Fairy_Books

From WP though: 'authors, including E. Nesbit, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle, were influenced by the Langs' books. J. R. R. Tolkien wrote that "In English none probably rival either the popularity, or the inclusiveness, or the general merits of the twelve books of twelve colours which we owe to Andrew Lang and to his wife."

Actually had a somewhat of tale of their own in publishing.

'Although Andrew is often credited with selecting the stories in the Fairy Books, most of the work was done by Nora. Nora and a team of other writers, who were mostly women and included May Kendall and Violet Hunt, translated these into English and adapted them to suit Victorian and Edwardian notions of propriety. However, as Andrew acknowledges in a preface to The Lilac Fairy Book (1910), "The fairy books have been almost wholly the work of Mrs. Lang, who has translated and adapted them from the French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, and other languages."'

[inatreecrown2]

Please add a column whether it is an actual recording of a human voice or AI generated.

[sjf → inatreecrown2]

There needs to be a column for the name of the narrator. I will listen to almost anything read by a narrator that I like. The LibriVox version of Flatland has long, detailed descriptions of the illustrations, but I've still listened to it several times because the narrator has a great accent.

She's Ruth Golding btw. https://librivox.org/reader/2607?primary_key=2607&search_cat...

[inatreecrown2 → sjf]

That is a good idea. Thanks for the link to Ruth Golding, great voice!

[libridev → sjf]

That's a good idea, it would likely help filter my voice preference. Some of the audio recording are more difficult to listen to than others.

[libridev → inatreecrown2]

The lit2go and librivox audio sources should all be human. The project Gutenberg are all AI generated.

[WillAdams]

The big thing I want in a book repository is a hierarchical list which will allow browsing by subject.

One site which does work well for this (for textual books) and which is well-regarded is:

https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/subjects.html

which uses the LoC identifier for a given text.

A project which past me wanted for future me was to read one book from each LoC category, and then to repeat that for sub-categories --- young me did that for the Dewey Decimal system for the high school library, but there were a number of gaps in the collection, and at that time, I didn't have the discipline or resources to make note of them so as to source books from other book repositories.

[sgc]

I will definitely be using this. However it is missing some data. For example, filtering on author: aquinas yields nothing, but see https://librivox.org/author/1199?primary_key=1199&search_cat...

[libridev → sgc]

That's a good point; this definitely needs improvement. I'm planning to refine my data collection and matching process. Right now, I'm using string matching to build the tables, which may result in some data loss. The next iteration will include complete catalogs for all of them.

[sgc → libridev]

Librivox has a very open api:

https://librivox.org/api/info

For example, you can query using only the first letter, so it's quite easy to quickly cache their entire collection (please don't give them the HN hug of death):

https://librivox.org/ ... api/feed/audiobooks/author/^a

Of course, specify json or something closer to your internal data structures.

[jdougan]

I'm not sure if it is your issue or not, but when I searched for "red planet" your index entry says it's the Robert A. Heinlein novel, but the link to Librivox goes to the page for the William John Locke book.

[cheschire]

The one book listed by Asimov links to a book of the same name by a different author.

[whyage → cheschire]

Same with the Mother Night by Vonnegut, which leads to a different book. I was surprised to see a free Vonnegut book, but alas.

[vmilner]

A few of the librivox Hugh Lofting Dr Dolittle readings arent picked up (post office, zoo)

[wlonkly]

Nice! I hadn't really thought about audiobook versions of free books.

I wanted to see how many modern books it has (Gutenberg etc. is valuable, but often I'd prefer modern writing), but it says that eg. Shelley's "A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays" is from 2006. Shelley died at least a few years before 2006. Maybe the year is the recording date?

If so, that's not that useful to me, I'd want to see the date of the work, not the recording.

[rahimnathwani]

Congrats on launching :)

I suggest you add a 'detail' view so that:

- each book has its own URL (which can be shared), and

- mobile users can easily see the external links (which are hard to see in a list view on a narrow screen)

[libridev → rahimnathwani]

Definitely! In this iteration, my focus was on functionality to get the data out there. I can improve the UI to make the filtering system sleeker and more mobile-friendly. Additionally, I plan to create individual pages for the books, where I can include thumbnails and other finer details.

[rkagerer]

Count of Monte Cristo is in there, highly recommended!

[ClaraForm → rkagerer]

Thank you for that. Downloaded.

@OP: I'm wondering if more than just sorting, whether filtering could be added? I would want to find both highly rated books with high numbers of reviews.

[libridev → ClaraForm]

I am going to look into building out a more extensive filtering system where you could combine filters. Trying to decide on a balance of complexity and ease of use.

My personal use I aim to solve is getting accurate lists of the top rated books for a given genre and perhaps before a given year. I've been listening to lots of audio books recently, yet I only have so much time so I am aiming to only listen to the best.

[lukasb]

Are the ratings for the books, or for the recordings?

[libridev → lukasb]

The ratings are for the books not the audio recording. Unfortunately there is no data points for the rating of the audio, since the sources don't collect rating.

I could add a feature to allow for audio recording rating in the future. It would be helpful since some audio recordings can be of poor quality.

[WillAdams → libridev]

Ratings are collected for Librivox recordings in their app --- check and see if they can be accessed externally?

[LinguaBrowse]

Could I search on language? Want to see what the Japanese options are.

[lewisdbentley → LinguaBrowse]

I second this. I'm learning French and would appreciate a way to filter by language.

[reassess_blind]

Can't seem to click any of the books.

[libridev → reassess_blind]

I just updated the UI so its more mobile friendly. The row is now click able so it opens up a model with a more detailed view

[roetlich]

I love that the search is so fast.