Help | Loyal Books

By Scott Carpenter

As you know, the audiobooks and ebooks that you can find on LoyalBooks.com fall under public domain and they are free for bookworms like you. Many people may think that public domain automatically means “free” but that isn’t quite all there is to it. Yes, you can use these audiobooks and ebooks for free because they are under public domain, but what exactly does that mean?

Collected Public Domain Works of H. P. Lovecraft

To put it simply, public domain means that no single person owns the work, but the public owns it. That means that nobody can copyright the single work on its own and so anybody can use it. Most of the books on this site are under public domain because their copyrights have expired. As you will notice, many of the books on this site are well-known classics that were published long ago. That is because all works published prior to 1923 now fall under the public domain. Other works may have fallen into public domain because their creators failed to renew their copyright. The current law for copyrighting a book is that the copyright is in place for the lifetime of the author plus 70 years after the author’s death and so many of the popular books that have come out in recent decades likely will not fall into public domain anytime soon. However, it is possible that new works can fall into public domain if the author chooses to dedicate the work to the public domain and in doing so, forfeit his or her intellectual property to the public. As you can imagine this doesn’t happen often, so the majority of public domain works are the older works with expired copyrights.

And so what public domain boils down to is that you can continue to enjoy multitudes of great works for free thanks to either the generosity of the author or the expiration of their copyrights! Regardless of how the works fall under public domain, I think it is safe to say that we are all grateful that we can use them for free! Have fun perusing the selection of free public domain audiobooks and ebooks that we have compiled for your use!

For a more in-depth discussion of what constitutes public domain and copyright law, visit:

Jump to:

iPhone
iTunes
Android

iPhone and iPad

Podcasts are a great way to listen to audiobooks but they do take a little bit of time to set up. You’ll find that once you have the software installed and working, podcasts are one of the fastest and easiest ways to listen to audiobooks. They let you see all the chapters of your book and switch between them. Podcasts also save your place like a bookmark in a paper book. Finally podcasts will let you change the playback speed so that you can get through a book faster.

iPhone
The easiest way to get going with podcasts is to use an iPhone and download Apple’s podcast app. Once the podcast app is installed you can use Safari to browse to BooksShouldBeFree.com and when you find your favorite book click on the podcast button.

Next, your iPhone will redirect you from the browser to the podcast app. From here, you will need to subscribe to the podcast. The subscribe button will look like one of these examples:

Next switch to the My Podcasts section at the bottom of the app and then select the new podcast that you just subscribed to.

Now you can select Add Old Episodes and select all the episodes or just the ones that you would like to listen to.

By default Apple’s podcast app will just play one chapter of the book and stop. If you would like it to automatically start the next chapter you can go into the settings area. Then you can select Play Order and change it to Newest First.

Now you’re all set to enjoy your podcast. Just navigate back to the podcast and select the first chapter to listen to the book.

iTunes

For starters, from a PC or a Mac computer you can download Apple’s iTunes software here. http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/

Next look for the iTunes icon on a book page and click it to add that book to iTunes.

Depending on your browser you may get a confirmation dialog box like one of the following.

After confirming you the next step is to subscribe in iTuens and confirm your subscription when prompted.

The next step is to click on the podcast area and then on Add Old Episodes. By default iTunes only downloads the first chapter of the book and this step ensures you have the entire book downloaded. Once on the Add Old Episodes screen you’ll want hit Add All and then Done.

Now there is one final step. By default iTunes plays one chapter of the book and then stops. To set iTunes to play one chapter after another you’ll want to go into the settings area and select Play Order > Newest First and finally click Done.

That’s it. Your podcast is all set up and ready to play. Just click on the first chapter to start listening. If interested you could also plug in an iPod or iPhone and sync the podcast onto your device so that you can listen on the go.

Android

To listen to podcasts on Android you will need to download a podcast or RSS reader app. We recommend Podcast Addict because of it’s excellent playback controls that let you adjust the playback speed up to 3x the original speed.

Next browse LoyalBooks.com from your Android phone or tablet for your favorite book. Then press and hold the RSS section.

This will bring up the following menu where you can “copy link address”. This is necessary because Android opens RSS files natively rather than in external viewers like the Podcast Addict App.

Now we need to open the Podcast Addict app and and add in the RSS file we copied from Loyal Books.

The app automatically fills in the URL from the clipboard so all you have to do is touch Add.

Then you can back out of that screen and select the newly added podcast on the App’s main screen. This brings up the list of chapters. From here you can start listening. Depending on how your app is configured the chapters may show up in reverse order. If this is the case you can adjust the sort order as follows.