How to listen
Each recito audiobook is a single .m4b file — the audio, chapter
markers, and cover art in one package. No DRM, no accounts: the file is yours to
copy and keep.
Press play on a book's page and the browser player does the job: it remembers your place, navigates by chapter, and puts the book on your phone's lock screen.
In your browser
The player on each book's page is a full audiobook player, not a preview:
- It remembers your place. Close the tab, reload, or come back tomorrow: playback resumes where you stopped. Books in progress wait on the homepage under "Continue listening" — title, narrator, and how much is left — and their covers get a thin progress line while you browse. Positions are kept per voice, since a place in one narrator's recording means nothing in another's. Finishing a book resets it, so the next visit starts clean; the × on a shelf row drops a book you don't plan to finish. And if a narration is fixed and re-published, the saved place is discarded instead of landing you in the wrong spot.
- Chapters. Under the player, every chapter with its start time; click one to jump there. The current chapter is highlighted as you listen.
- Skip back / ahead. ↺ 15 s for the sentence you just missed, 30 s ↻ to jump ahead.
- Speed and volume. The speed button cycles 0.75× → 1× → 1.25× → 1.5× → 2×. Your speed and your volume are both remembered across all books, not per book.
- Sleep timer. The Sleep button cycles 15 → 30 → 45 → 60 minutes → end of chapter, then off.
- Lock screen. On a phone, the book sits on the lock screen and in the notification shade with its cover, the current chapter title, and a draggable progress bar; headset and hardware buttons work for play/pause, ±15/30 s, and previous/next chapter.
All of it lives only in your browser's local storage: no account, and nothing is sent anywhere. The flip side is that your place doesn't follow you to another browser or device. For a library of books, offline listening, and bookmarks, download the audiobook into a player app.
Player apps
Every app listed below is free software.
Linux
- Cozy — a purpose-built audiobook player (GPL): remembers your place per book, chapter list, sleep timer. Install from Flathub or your distribution's package manager (it's in Debian, for instance); source code.
- VLC and mpv — general players from your distribution's own
repositories; both read
.m4bchapters. - Running your own library: Audiobookshelf (GPL) — a self-hosted audiobook server with a web player.
PureOS / Librem devices
Cozy, VLC, and mpv are all in the PureOS Store (PureOS repositories and Flathub); Cozy adapts to the Librem 5's phone display.
Android
Install from F-Droid, the free-software app repository:
- Voice — a purpose-built audiobook player (GPL): position memory, chapters, playback speed.
- VLC and mpv-android — the general players, also on F-Droid.
- Obtainium (GPL) — another way to get the apps above: it installs and updates them directly from the developers' own release pages, no store in between.
GrapheneOS
F-Droid and Obtainium both work on GrapheneOS, so the apps above install as-is. The store that community favors, Accrescent, is curated and small.
Proprietary operating systems (not recommended)
If a proprietary system can't be avoided, free-software players still exist for it:
Follow the catalog
The catalog is published twice, for the two kinds of app that follow collections:
- New-audiobooks feed (Atom) — a feed reader pings you
as new books appear. Add this address to the reader:
https://recito.org/feed.atom - OPDS catalog (OPDS
2.0) — a compatible library app browses the whole archive the way
this site does — covers, descriptions, and all — without opening a
browser. Add this address as a catalog in the app:
https://recito.org/opds.json