Gulliver's Travels Audiobook, Free

Jonathan Swift died in 1745, and Gulliver's Travels has been public domain for a very long time. Project Gutenberg carries the complete text as ebook #17157, so there's no cost or paywall standing between you and the book. What a plain Gutenberg file can't do is read itself to you.

LoudReader does that part. Gulliver's Travels is already in the app's built-in library of 70,000+ free Gutenberg books, so there's nothing to find or convert. Open the app, search for it, press play. You can hear the voice first on the Gulliver's Travels page, which has a rendered sample.

The whole book. A lot of people only know the Lilliput voyage, because it's the section most abridged children's editions keep and the rest get cut. The complete novel has three more voyages: Brobdingnag, where Gulliver is the tiny one and a giant king delivers one of literature's harshest verdicts on humanity; the flying island of Laputa, populated by useless philosophers; and finally the land of the Houyhnhnms, rational horses who rule over filthy, greedy creatures that look exactly like us. Swift's satire gets darker and stranger as it goes, and the full text this reading uses is exactly as Project Gutenberg has it, unabridged.

Direct answer: it's a synthetic voice, not a human actor. LoudReader builds its narration from natural offline voices, generated live on your device as the book plays, with no separate audio file to download or store. It reads the whole novel in one consistent voice, Gulliver's deadpan reporting included, rather than performing distinct characters.

That deadpan tone is actually a decent fit for how the book is written. Swift's joke is that Gulliver narrates the most absurd things in the flat, matter-of-fact voice of a ship's log, and a synthetic reader doesn't editorialize either. Still, if what you want is a performed audiobook with dramatic emphasis and a distinct voice actor, a commercial edition will give you that, and this app won't pretend to compete with it on that front. What it gives you instead is the whole book, free, on demand.

1. Get LoudReader from the App Store. Free, no account required.
2. Search the built-in Gutenberg catalog inside the app for Gulliver's Travels. No file to hunt down, no conversion step.
3. Press play. LoudReader is fully on-device and private, your library never leaves your device, so the whole book plays without a connection once it's loaded.
4. If you'd rather push through the four voyages faster once you're used to the voice, Premium adds playback speed from 0.3x to 3.0x. The free tier plays at normal speed.