Project Gutenberg + AI = Free High-Quality Audiobook Classics

Project Gutenberg is well-known as a volunteer-driven, non-profit project that digitizes free public-domain books, mostly those whose copyright has expired. However, their eBooks were often uncomfortable to read as plain text. Standard eBooks took the most popular ones and improved the typography and device-specific formatting, such that they look as modern as other retail eBooks.

The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection is a new collaboration between Project Gutenberg, Microsoft AI, and MIT to create audiobooks with natural-sounding speech using neural text-to-speech technology. I wouldn’t say it perfectly matches that of a trained voice actor, but it is certainly a huge improvement over the old robotic voice. I recently read Call of the Wild by Jack London as it was on my kid’s summer reading list, and you can compare the different versions yourself.

• Call of the Wild (original .mp3)
• Call of the Wild (Microsoft AI-generated .mp3)
• Call of the Wild (Gutenberg.org eBook files)
• Call of the Wild (Standard eBooks version)

Here is the current full list of available audiobooks. You can also find them on Google Podcats, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. This makes it much easier to listen to classic books during your commute and also for the visually-impaired.

For some title ideas, check out this list of the most downloaded Project Gutenburg eBooks. Here are the top 10 right now:

• Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley
• Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• A Doll’s House : a play by Henrik Ibsen
• Moby Dick; Or, The Whale by Herman Melville
• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde