I was paying Audible $14.95 a month for one credit. One book. If I wanted two books that month — tough luck, buy another credit for $12. I did this for three years. That's over $500 for maybe 40 books. I'm a software engineer. I should've
optimized this sooner.
The breaking point was a Thursday night in February. I'd just burned my monthly credit on a mass-market thriller that turned out to be terrible. DNF by chapter three. No refund. I remember sitting there thinking — most of the books I actually
want to read are old. Like, really old. Dostoevsky. Orwell. Hemingway. Kafka. These are public domain. Why am I paying for them?
I started digging.
LibriVox was the first thing I found. Volunteer-narrated audiobooks. Free. Massive catalog. I downloaded their recording of Crime and Punishment and lasted about eight minutes. The narrator was someone's uncle reading into a USB microphone in
what sounded like a bathroom. Every chapter had a different volunteer with a different accent and recording setup. Chapter five was literally whispering. I respect the project — thousands of volunteers giving their time is beautiful. But
listening to it? Not beautiful.
Then I found CastReader kind of by accident. I was actually looking for a text-to-speech extension to read Hacker News comments aloud (don't judge me, long commute), and the extension had this "Library" section. I clicked it expecting maybe
200 curated books. There were 50,000.
Fifty thousand.
I opened The Great Gatsby. Hit play. And — okay, it's an AI voice, not Morgan Freeman. But it was consistent. Clean audio. Proper pacing. No bathroom echo. No jarring narrator switch between chapters. It just read the book, paragraph by
paragraph, with this highlight following along on screen so I could glance at the text whenever I wanted.
I listened to the entire thing on a Saturday afternoon while doing laundry and cleaning the kitchen. Two and a half hours. Free. No credit. No subscription.
That week I went a little nuts. Frankenstein on Monday's commute. The first three chapters of Moby Dick on Tuesday (I'll finish it eventually. Probably). Metamorphosis on Wednesday — which is only like 90 minutes and genuinely better as audio
because Kafka's sentences have this rhythm that you miss when you're reading silently. Thursday I started Dracula, which is structured as diary entries and letters so it works incredibly well in audio format.
My Audible app sent me a notification. "You have 1 unused credit." I stared at it for a while.
Here's the thing about public domain books that people forget. Everything published before 1929 is free. Not free as in "free trial." Free as in nobody owns it anymore. That includes basically all of the Western literary canon. Jane Austen.
Mark Twain. Oscar Wilde. Edgar Allan Poe. Arthur Conan Doyle. H.P. Lovecraft. All of Shakespeare. All of Dickens. Homer. Dante. Tolstoy. Chekhov. The Brontë sisters. I could keep going. The point is — if the author has a Wikipedia page and
died more than 75 years ago, you can probably listen to their entire bibliography for free.
CastReader's library is basically Project Gutenberg's catalog with AI narration layered on top. You can browse by genre, by author, filter by rating. The ratings come from Goodreads so you can actually find the good stuff instead of scrolling
through 19th century agricultural pamphlets (there are a surprising number of those in Project Gutenberg).
I showed this to my teammate during standup. Bad idea. We lost fifteen minutes of sprint planning to everyone browsing the catalog on their phones. My tech lead found a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories and I haven't seen his Airpods out
since. Our PM — and I quote — said "wait, The Picture of Dorian Gray is free? I was about to buy this on Audible." That would've been $11.
Some things I learned after a month of this.
The AI voice handles non-fiction better than fiction. Factual prose, essays, philosophy — it's great. The voice stays neutral and clear, which is what you want. For dialogue-heavy fiction, you notice it's one voice doing everything. It
doesn't do character voices. If you're reading a novel with lots of "he said, she said," you sometimes lose track of who's speaking. For something like Marcus Aurelius's Meditations or Thoreau's Walden? Perfect medium.
The browser-based approach is actually an advantage, not a limitation. I initially thought "ugh, I need Chrome open." But it means I can listen on any device with a browser. My work laptop. My personal MacBook. My wife's iPad. No app to
install, no syncing accounts, no wondering which device has my progress. And there's a send-to-phone feature for when I want to keep listening on a walk.
I still have Audible. I use it for new releases — stuff that came out this year, contemporary fiction, that one fantasy series everyone on Reddit keeps recommending. But for classics? I cancelled the autopay and switched to buying credits
individually when I actually need them. Went from $14.95/month to maybe $12 every two or three months.
My colleague asked me last week what I've been reading lately. I rattled off six titles. She looked at me like I'd grown a second head. "When do you have time for all that?"
I don't. I listen while I'm cooking. While I'm on the subway. While I'm waiting for CI to pass. While I'm doing the dishes. Twelve minutes here, twenty minutes there. It adds up fast when the content is free and unlimited and you don't have
to agonize over whether this particular book is worth spending a credit on.
The library is at castreader.ai/books if you want to browse. The Chrome extension is at castreader.ai. Both free. I'm not affiliated with them — I just cancelled a $180/year subscription because of them and figured other people might want to
do the same.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have 200 pages of War and Peace queued up and a mass deployment to babysit.
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