Licensing
Most of what is on this site is not ours to license, and saying so plainly is cheaper than being asked.
The short version
Supreme Audiobooks publishes public-domain recordings of public-domain books. The recordings are not ours. The texts are not ours. What we built is the layer around them — the catalogue, the written descriptions, the translations, the transcripts and the quote selections — and that layer is the only thing the paid API sells.
| Thing | Whose it is | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| The audio | Public domain, recorded by LibriVox volunteers | Nothing |
| The book texts | Public domain, out of copyright | Nothing |
| Every page on this site | Ours, and free to read and to crawl | Nothing |
| Bulk machine access to the catalogue |
Ours — the metadata, descriptions, translations and transcripts we produced | Priced |
If you only want to listen to an audiobook, or read a page, or send a crawler over the site, you can stop reading here. None of the rest applies to you.
The audio is not ours to license
Every recording on this site comes from LibriVox, where volunteers read out-of-copyright books aloud and place the results in the public domain. That means you already have every right to them that we do. You do not need our permission, our licence or our money to use a LibriVox recording, and we could not withhold any of those things if we wanted to.
The same recordings are downloadable from LibriVox and the Internet Archive at original quality, free, with no involvement from us. If that is what you came for, go straight there — it will be a better copy than a re-encode of ours.
LibriVox asks to be credited as a courtesy rather than requiring it. We credit the readers on every book page and in every video, and we would ask you to do the same, but that is a request between you and them, not a term of ours.
What is actually ours
Assembling a catalogue is work even when every ingredient is free. These are the parts we made, with honest counts as of today:
| Ours | What it is | How much |
|---|---|---|
| Catalogue | One normalised record per audiobook: slug, title, author, genre, runtime, publication year where known, and the YouTube id | 3,024 books 1,822 authors |
| Descriptions | A written summary and commentary for each book. Generated by a language model, then published — not written by a person and not checked against the book | 3,021 books |
| Translations | Titles and descriptions machine-translated into 11 languages | 31,521 records 2,884 books |
| Transcripts | Machine transcripts of the spoken audio, each in 12 languages | 1,644 records 137 books |
| Quotes | Selected passages with the surrounding context | 1,699 quotes 175 books |
Machine-made, and labelled as such. The descriptions, the translations and the transcripts are all produced by models rather than people. They are useful and they are also wrong sometimes. If you are building on them, read /llms.txt first — it lists the specific ways this data is thinner than it looks, including which fields are mostly empty.
What a purchase grants
Paying for a metered endpoint buys you the right to read, store, index, embed and generate answers from the material listed above, for any purpose, commercial included, with no quantity limit and no expiry on what you already fetched.
It does not buy the right to republish the catalogue verbatim as a competing catalogue. That is the one thing we ask you not to do, and it is the only restriction on this page.
Attribution
- Not required for generated answers, summaries, embeddings, search indexes, or anything else where our text is an input rather than the output.
- Required if you reproduce more than a paragraph of our writing verbatim — a description, a transcript passage or a quote — in which case name Supreme Audiobooks and link the book page.
None of this touches the audio or the book texts, which are public domain and carry no attribution requirement from us at all.
What stays free, permanently
- Every page a person can open, in all 12 site languages.
- Every audiobook, every transcript and every subtitle track, as served to a browser.
- Search-engine crawling. Googlebot, Bingbot and their equivalents are never charged and never will be.
/robots.txt,/llms.txt, every sitemap, the RSS feed and the podcast feed.- The machine-readable versions of this page:
/.well-known/x402and/api/agent/manifest.
What is metered is one narrow thing: an automated client asking for the whole catalogue at once instead of browsing it. Prices and the payment flow are on the API page.
If something here is wrong
If a recording on this site should not be public domain, or a description says something untrue about a book or its author, tell us and it comes down — there is a takedown page for the formal route and contact@supremeaudiobooks.com for everything else. This is one person running a pipeline, so the fastest way to get something fixed is to say exactly which slug is wrong.
Nothing on this page is legal advice, and none of it overrides the site terms where the two disagree.