About The Book and Me
The Book and Me is a free, independent project. It publishes biblical and related ancient texts in the order scholars believe they were written, lets you search and read them, and reads them aloud — in a synthetic voice, not a human one.
The voice is AI-generated
Every recorded reading on this site, and on our 24/7 streams, is produced by a text-to-speech model (Kokoro, voice “bm_lewis”). There is no human narrator. The audio files are published at the Internet Archive as one audio file per chapter (2,537 chapters) with verse timings; the Internet Archive hosts them, it did not record them. When you press Listen, the page plays that synthetic reading, or your own device’s built-in speech voice if the recording is not available.
What the library is
172 works and 2,537 chapters of the Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox and Ethiopian canons, with the apocrypha, pseudepigrapha and Apostolic Fathers, arranged by when each is dated — not by traditional Bible order. That order is a scholarly reconstruction, not a fact, and the site says so. The texts are public domain: the World English Bible (eBible.org) for the canonical books, R. H. Charles’s 1917 Enoch and Jubilees, and the Ante-Nicene Fathers, among others. Nothing is taken from a modern copyrighted translation. See the credits for the full list, and the accuracy report for what has been checked and what has not.
The livestreams
The same reading plays around the clock on YouTube · Twitch · Kick. These are pre-rendered playback streams in the order the texts were written, not live performances. Where a platform has a rerun label we use it. Some replies in stream chat are written by an AI assistant working for the project.
What this is not
- It is not medical, mental-health or pastoral advice. Many people listen at bedtime; we make no claim that it helps with sleep, anxiety or any condition.
- It takes no side between the canons: it prints them all and says which is which.
- It has no ads and needs no account. Reading and listening are free; an account is an optional way to keep your place across devices.
Who runs it
An independent maintainer. The code is open source (MIT licence) and public at GitHub; the texts are public domain and the reference data carries its own credits on the credits page. See Contact to get in touch and Privacy for what is and is not collected.