About Us
Open Ear Books publishes audiobooks and gives them away, complete, with the full text of every chapter beside the recording.
Why the text is there
An audiobook you can only listen to is a narrower thing than an audiobook you can also read. Reading along while listening is what this library is built for, though plenty of people will simply listen, which is reason enough on its own.
It is for anybody who likes being read to. It is particularly useful to people learning English, to people who follow a page better with a voice beside it, and to anyone who wants to check a sentence they did not quite catch.
What it costs
Nothing. There is no account, no subscription, and no part of the library behind a payment.
How it is made
Most of the texts are public-domain editions of older books. Some are new writing of our own, such as The Odyssey in Plain English. Each title's page says which it is, and on what terms it is free to use. The narration is synthesised speech: the voices are produced by computer, not read by a person. The cover designs are made for this library, and each title's page says where its own cover image came from.
Nothing here has been read through line by line. A library this size cannot be, and claiming otherwise would be a promise we could not keep, so mistakes do get through: a mis-read word in a recording, a slip in a text. Most of them will be found by the people reading and listening, and we fix the ones we are told about. Where a work is in the public domain in some countries and not others, the page says so and the recording is offered only where it is free to offer.
Who makes it, and how it is paid for
Open Ear Books is a small independent publisher. Producing an audiobook and then serving it to everybody who wants it costs real money, month after month, and the library stays free.
The costs are met from several places rather than from readers:
- Affiliate commissions. When somebody buys a printed copy, or anything else, through a link on one of our pages, we earn a small share of the sale. It costs you nothing extra, and the price is the same as it would be without us. Those links are marked (paid link), and the Privacy Notice sets out what they mean for you.
- Private donations and corporate sponsorships. Both are thanked on our Contributors page, and a private donor is named there only if they would like to be. Open Ear Books is not a registered charity, so contributions are not tax-deductible, and a sponsor does not choose what goes in the library.
- The publisher's own money. Open Ear Books pays for whatever the rest does not.
Swag is coming soon, and will join that list once it is on sale. There is no advertising on this site or in our emails. If that changes, the Privacy Notice will say what it is and what it collects before it starts, not afterwards.
If you would like to help with any of that, please reach out to us here.
Harry Brown
Publisher