About MyVoxBox

What MyVoxBox is

MyVoxBox is a free audiobook player that runs in your web browser. It plays the public-domain recordings of LibriVox: books whose copyright has expired, read aloud by volunteers and released for anyone to use. You can search the whole LibriVox catalogue, stream a book straight away, download chapters for offline listening and come back to where you stopped.

This website is the companion to the player. It publishes curated collections of those recordings, with cover art, summaries, recording details and a link that opens each book in the player, so that you can find something worth hearing without searching for it first.

Why it exists

Listening to a classic book should not require an account, a subscription or an app store. MyVoxBox is built around a few plain goals: play public-domain audiobooks in the browser, keep your listening data on your own device rather than in an account or a cloud library, work offline where it can, and stay simple enough to maintain. There are no ads, no paid tier and no profiling.

LibriVox and the Internet Archive

Every recording you can play in MyVoxBox was made by LibriVox volunteers, who read public-domain texts and publish the recordings into the public domain. LibriVox also publishes the catalogue information the player and this website use: titles, authors, readers, chapter lists, summaries and cover art. The audio files themselves are hosted by the Internet Archive, and the player streams or downloads them from there.

MyVoxBox is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, operated by or endorsed by LibriVox or the Internet Archive. If you enjoy the recordings, both organisations welcome volunteers and donations.

How the collections are made

The collections on this site are curated selections from the LibriVox catalogue. Each one gathers recordings around a theme, a mood or a kind of listening, and many entries carry an editorial note explaining why that recording is included and, where it matters, what to expect from older material. The notes describe the recordings; they are not reviews, and not every note was written by the same person.

Covers and summaries are taken only from each recording's own LibriVox catalogue entry and feed artwork, never from another edition. Some summaries are credited to Wikipedia; those are adapted from Wikipedia articles and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence, as each such entry states. The two popularity lists are observations of Archive.org download counts on a stated date and are not updated continuously. Recording details such as length, number of sections and readers come from the LibriVox catalogue and can lag behind changes made there.

Source code

The MyVoxBox player is released under the Apache License 2.0, so its source code can be inspected, modified and run independently. A public link to the repository will be added here when one exists.

Contact

MyVoxBox is made by Philip Cox. Questions, corrections and suggestions for the collections are welcome at [email protected].