Audiobooks

Books that belong to everyone.

The best books ever written are out of copyright. Anyone may publish them, and anyone may record them. Most have never been given a decent recording — or the recording exists and is locked inside somebody's subscription. We are making them properly, as files you keep.

In production Nothing available to download yet
Where we are starting

The first titles

These are the books being worked on first. None of them is finished, and none is available to download yet — when one is, it will appear here with a price and a sample.

PP In production

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen

1813 Public domain
FR In production

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley

1818 Public domain
JE In production

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë

1847 Public domain
MD In production

Moby-Dick

Herman Melville

1851 Public domain
DG In production

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde

1890 Public domain
DR In production

Dracula

Bram Stoker

1897 Public domain
Want to know when the first one lands? Write to hello@miabazo.com and we will tell you. We do not run a mailing list, so that is genuinely the only thing that will happen.
How they are made

From a printed page to a finished recording

We are open about the process, including the parts that use synthesis, because you deserve to know what you are listening to before you buy it.

The text

Sourced from Project Gutenberg, which has spent fifty years digitising and proofing books whose copyright has expired. Every recording records where its text came from.

Preparation

The text is structured into real chapters, with front matter, footnotes and transcription artefacts removed, so the recording follows the book rather than the file.

Narration

Recorded with synthesised narration, chapter by chapter. Where a book carries distinct voices, characters are given consistent ones rather than a single flat read.

Mastering

Assembled into chaptered files with correct metadata and cover art, at a consistent level, in formats any player can open.

On synthesised narration. These are not recordings of human actors, and we will never describe them as though they were. Synthesis is what makes it viable to record books nobody would fund a studio for. Every listing says so plainly, and there will be a sample of every book before you spend anything.
Rights and sources

Why we may publish these

Copyright expires. Once it has, a work enters the public domain and anyone may publish, adapt, perform or record it without permission and without paying a licence. That is not a loophole — it is the deal that copyright was built on, and it is what makes a project like this possible.

Every title we work on is checked before any work starts, and the position is recorded per jurisdiction, because the rules genuinely differ:

United Kingdom and EU
Copyright generally lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years. Every author in our first set died more than a century ago.
United States
Works published before 1930 are in the public domain, with the boundary moving forward by one year each January.
Translations and editions
A translation carries its own separate copyright, and a modern critical edition can too. We work from editions whose own copyright has also expired, not merely from old books.

Our recordings are our own work, so the audio itself is ours to sell. The underlying text is nobody's to own, and we make no claim over it.

If you believe we have got a rights position wrong on any title, please tell us at hello@miabazo.com and we will take it down while we check.

Listening

They play anywhere

Our recordings are ordinary audio files with no DRM. They work in any player that opens an M4B or an MP3 — ours included, but there is nothing to stop you using something else.