About Book Radio
Every voice on Book Radio is a computer-generated narrator — not the author, and not a human reader.
Book Radio plays public-domain books aloud, one chapter after another, continuously.
How it plays
Press the large button and the current book begins. When a chapter ends the next one follows automatically, and when the last chapter finishes the book starts again from the beginning. You can jump to any chapter from the list on the front page, and Skip to next moves on immediately.
Playback stays within one book. Reaching the end of a book returns you to its first chapter rather than running on into a different one — finishing a book should not quietly hand you a different novel. When there is more than one book, each appears as its own section and switching is a deliberate tap.
The voice
The narration is synthesized by a speech model. It is not a recording of the author, and it is not a human reading. That is worth saying plainly, because a synthetic voice reading a famous book is exactly the kind of thing that can be mistaken for an authentic recording — on a phone lock screen, in a car, or by someone who joins halfway through.
For the same reason the lock-screen information names the narration as computer-generated rather than naming a performer.
How recordings are credited
Every recording states who wrote the original, when, and under what licence, and links to the source text. Each one also records how it relates to the original:
- Read as written — the original text, narrated in full.
- Summary — text rewritten by a computer program, not the author's own words. Anything of this kind is labelled as such wherever it appears, including on the front page.
Everything currently on Book Radio is read as written.
What may be published here
Only material whose licence permits distributing a synthesized reading. Public-domain texts from Project Gutenberg and similar sources qualify. Material under a no-derivatives licence does not, because a synthesized reading is a derivative work — so it is not published here even with full attribution.
How it is built
Book Radio is a single static page served directly by a web server. There is no account system, no comments, no analytics and no tracking of any kind. Audio is streamed on demand and is never stored on your device by the site.