LibriVox Audio Books Pro
reviews and complaints

What I love most is the ability to control playback speed via a sliding scale. This is way better than any other podcast app I have tried. Also love the ease of making lists and it serves up the newest Librivox offerings, snd it displays the cover art. I could go on and on raving about this app. I have the paid vat soon, which has no ads.

I will be forever grateful to all the amazing volunteers who make these audio books available to everyone. I tell everyone about this! Truly wonderful. LibriVox helped me through a serious accident, the loss of my father, and a pandemic! Listening soothes me, and I have heard so many great books that I have never before read. Thank you to all of you!

I’ve used other apps to access LibriVox content, but this one is my favorite. It’s not flashy, but it’s functional, intuitive, and easy on my battery. An old friend and a constant companion - indispensable to the student of history and philosophy, or the lover of classical literature.

Uh-oh… fubarred by the latest update. Fix it soon, please! I use this app daily!

I really like LibriVox and it’s volunteer readers. I’ve listened to books as I go to sleep for years. However, an update seems to have eliminated the chapter scroll bar. If I fall asleep during a chapter, I now have to start at the beginning and fast jump in 30 second increments to find my place again. I used to be able to move the slider to any point in the chapter.

When you click out of a book to go back to the list of other books, it does not let you see the titles and they all get shoved off the screen to the right and you have to close the app and come back or it will not let you fix it. This happens every single time. Also, even if I download the books it does not let me listen to them when I am off-line. Very disappointing.

In both the Pro and original versions of this app, recordings have been repeatedly cutting off, often mid-sentence. To make matters worse, the app then loses your place, so when you go to resume listening, you have to fast forward over parts you’ve already heard. This began happening the moment they began charging for ad free service. So I’m now paying for a worse product.

I love this app and LibriVox in general, but in the past few days, the app has been closing out on me every few minutes. I’ve tried deleting and reinstalling, but it’s still glitching just the same. It could be my phone, but no other app is giving me trouble, so I’m inclined to believe it’s the app itself. Still no better app I have found for free listening, so I’m sticking with it.

I had a technical problem with the app and they fixed it and they wrote me back, an actual human email note thanking me for letting them know and explaining what went wrong. I’m grateful. Plus, this app seems to be the most convenient way to listen to LibriVox, and I’ve tried several. I listen everyday and have for years.
To be clear the app is not affiliated with the LibriVox organization.

Just got the pro version for my iPhone 7+. As soon as I click on a book, I see a piece of the book cover, and have no controls.

When I turn the phone sideways, I can adjust where in the chapter it is, but to change chapters, I have to exit the app and restart. No other settings are available. I tried deleting the app and downloading it again. All that did was lose all of my favorited books.

I recently updated the ap and they removed the navigation bar that allows you to quickly change to different part of story. Interestingly, it still appears in the photos of the app in the ap store. Also buttons are much, much smaller making them harder to use. There is so much screen space that thus was completely unnecessary. I highly regret updating the ap. Wish there was a way I could revert back to original.

This is a great app that reads to us as we drive around town or to bring entertainment to mindless tasks like laundry, dishes, and cleaning bathrooms.

Spend the $2 to save yourself from the annoying commercials or to keep your kids from accessing the web without parental controls by clicking on the ads .

Improvements: that there are two rating systems for books. First, for the content of the book and secondly for the quality of the reader(s). Also that it can somehow date stamp when I finish a book.

It is unbelievable to me that I can listen to many first person journals and accounts, also classical works on LibriVox- for free! I can’t say enough good things about LibriVox.
The only drawback is that the volunteer readers can be uneven in quality. Some are amazing, like the person that reads John Muir’s early journals. Others perform readings providing only a perfunctory performance or speed through without any nuance at all. So many wonderful readers outweigh the poor ones. All in all a fabulous resource! Thank you so much!

July 19, 2022: They just sent me an email to let know they’ve fixed the bug. Back working!

Old note: Used to love this app. I have the Pro version. For the past week it’s quite impossible to use. It keeps on dropping. This is not due to a bad wi-fi connection, since I am using it with downloaded books. Update: I realized that the audiobook stops bc the app makes my phone heat up. I tried the free version and same thing happens, my phone gets hot and stops the audiobook. Finally, I had to look the audiobook on YouTube to finish listening to it.

This app works well in general for finding, downloading and streaming audiobooks. But it does not conform to Apple UI standards - for example, swipe left to expose delete should be used instead of a button on chapter screen. The major UI issue is that “play” persists when unplugging earphones (Apple auto stops and remembers place on all other apps I use). Worse, when answering a phone or using sound on an activated app, the app does not suspend but continues to play over the conversation or voice message, etc. With these bugs fixed, it gets 5 stars.

During COVID, reading and listening to audiobooks have become much more important to me. Between digital membership in my county library and Librivox I am getting into literature that keeps me (as a retiree) mentally active.

Librivox is especially good at allowing me to dig into the literature of the past. Generally the readers are very professional and make it easy to listen. In some cases there are multiple versions with different readers. If you like one reader especially, you can search for other books that he/she read.

Thank you Librivox

DIO Roswell Georgia

Love this app! BUT...maybe it’s my small iPhone SE, but the elapsed time is not completely displayed, nor is the chapter currently playing. But the most annoying thing is that when I go back to the app after being away (even if I didn’t close it, but just switch over momentarily to another), the book chapter I was listening to doesn’t come up onscreen, and I have to hunt for it. It’s in the “recent” section, but not at the top or bottom (in case of sorting). Other than that, love the concept, love the app (much better than trying to listen from website). THANK YOU LibriVox and LibriVox volunteers! Blessings!

There’s a bug with elements getting moved over from the right by about 1cm, and sometimes the icons are incorrect when showing which chapters are downloading, but there are no ads, it works both online and off (if you download the audiobooks), the controls are simple and the big buttons make it easy (meaning a lot more safe) to use if I’m driving. I hope the bugs get fixed. They have seemed to linger. I also hope they make it so artwork gets saved for offline use when downloading an audiobook. Right now, it shows a generic cover when listening offline. Please don’t take my constructive criticism as a condemnation. This is a great app! I use it all the time, which is testimony to that. I’m very happy with it. I’d like to see some fixes done, but I’m also very grateful and happy with it as it is. Thank you to the developers for creating it and also for making sure to note “no ads” when issuing an update. I have had other developers put in ads without warning me and it’s really upset me. None of that here! Just honest updates. Thank you!

I got less than two minutes into my first book and it cut off. Tried again and it did the same thing. Please refund my money.

Used to work great. Now shuts off after about a minute. Deleted and reinstalled. Didn’t help. Don’t bother until they fix it.

I love librivox for giving me quality readings of my favorite books and authors. It is a wonderful resource. It makes my commute fly by.

Having to unlock my phone and go into the app every time I want to pause what I’m listening to is just annoying, especially while driving.

Paid for the app and the first book I listen to I get an ad before the second chapter if that’s the case would of never paid for it plan and simple

It doesnt keep playing after chapter ends i u have diff app open and doesnt resume playing after a video plays. Great selection but needs improvement

The point of an audiobook app is that I don’t need it to be open on my screen all the time in order for it to work. Not even worth $3, absolute garbage

It does not stay on. The screen turns dark and then the audio stops. The free version does not do this. In fact I can browse away and it still plays in the background

I have the free one and I can listen to any of the books. I thought, “why don’t I get the $2 version!? It will be ever so much better!” NOPE, can’t get it to work at all.

Search doesn’t work. When playing a audiobook the player screen is all messed up and won’t show the controls to stop, pause, or set the sleep timer. A four year old could code a better app.

the app was functioning fantastically until the iOS 9 update. now it's skipping two or three chapters at a time, and i've noticed that all the books i had downloaded had disappeared. hoping for a fix soon.

Lovely app but it seems like the last chapters of a lot of the books just don’t work? No rhyme or reason, they’ll work fine and then stop working for a while and then work again. Downloading doesn’t help. Seems like a pretty serious problem to me!

LOTS of glitches! So much so, that I have not been able to listen to a book yet. Downloaded a book, but can not get it to play. Another book won’t pick up where it left off. App has trouble & stalls when I have my phone plugged in to a charger.

I listened to a recording on a 6 hr road trip and the app kicked me off at least half a dozen times.

Painful, and dysfunctional. I’m going to endure through it because the books are so valuable to me not because I appreciate the app in any sense. ‍♂️

I love this app but every single book is rated four and a half stars. This makes it very difficult to find good books. So if you get this app please rate books that are not good or entertaining better than others for everyone’s sake. Also the delete all your review if you leave a bad review