What we do

© Listening Books

We are a UK charity providing a fantastic selection of high-quality audiobooks to over 7000 people across the UK who find it difficult or impossible to read due to illness or disability. We send our audiobooks through the post on MP3 CD or they can be listened to via the internet. Members can choose from a range of options to find the service that best suits their needs.

Our audio library is quick and easy to use and it will open up the wonderful world of books to anyone who finds it difficult to read in the usual way. We support the National Curriculum from Key Stage 2 to A-Level and have a huge range of fiction and non-fiction titles for both adults and children.

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All of our titles are either commercially sourced from the best publishers or recorded in-house in our digital studios by professionally qualified sound recording engineers. We do not make recordings in private homes on portable equipment. The charity led the voluntary sector in pioneering formal contracts with commercial publishers for the provision of their titles to people with print impairments. Additionally, our internet streaming service is unique in the UK and our education service goes far beyond just providing ‘English’ texts and supports subjects across much of the National Curriculum.

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The charity simply could not maintain its service without the active co-operation of publishers and authors.

Many authors come into Listening Books to be interviewed for our newsletter or to read their own books. We are grateful to them all. The charity has formal contracts with all of the major commercial audiobook publishers. It is not however, viable for us to clear intellectual copyright for all of our 2300 plus titles. The charity therefore operates an opt out scheme for authors to allow for the unlikely possibility that any author whose book is stocked in our library might want to assert their intellectual rights by asking us to remove their title from our library. In such circumstances we would of course immediately comply.