The Readers

Listening Books education programme, Sound Learning, acquires new titles for children and young people through buying from commercial audio publishers, just as we do with titles for adults, but in addition, Sound Learning records other titles which cannot be sourced in the commercial market. The charity depends on the generous help readers give, on a voluntary basis, to do this work. These readers give up their spare time during the day to come in and record for us simply because they love books and because they want to make a contribution to our service.

Listening Books would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our readers, past and present - without them, our library stock would be much less varied and interesting.

Becoming a volunteer reader for Listening Books

We mainly use trained actors but we will consider working with anyone who has the appropriate experience and can spare the time. If you would like to submit a sample of your work for consideration on tape or CD, then ideally the recording should contain at least two examples of your voice, reading different book genres (e.g. fiction, non-fiction, children's).

Readers will be required to record the books at our offices at 12 Lant Street, mainly during the hours of 9am-5pm Monday to Friday. Reasonable expenses will be reimbursed.

We currently have some books in our studios that we would love to record but they require accents we don’t have available from our current set of readers. If you or anyone you know is a trained actor and is able to volunteer some of their time (even if it is only a couple of hours each week) to complete one of the following books, in the following accents, please contact our studios.

The books and accents are:

Please send your audition tapes/CDs to:

Studios, Listening Books, 12 Lant St. London SE1 1QH .
You can also get in touch with our studios on 0207 407 9417
or email studios@listening-books.org.uk.