JB Smiths Blog – Author @ books4free.com

First, credit where it belongs: Books4Free exists because of Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, OpenStax, and eBible.org. Those teams did the hard work — decades of digitizing, proofing, and formatting the world’s public-domain books, and giving them away. I’m standing on their shoulders. What I’m adding is a reading experience around their work: an AI study assistant, on-demand audiobooks, and a home where it all lives together, free. I’ll be building a mobile app for droid and apple soon too, just want to get most of the languages done for the books that have been so important in my life, The Bible, The Big Book and others.

Here’s the current state:

About 2,000 books. Classics from Standard Ebooks and Gutenberg, OpenStax textbooks, recovery literature, philosophy, scripture. Every chapter of every book is free to read. That part never changes.

Seven Bibles, four languages, three writing systems. The King James and World English Bible in English. Reina-Valera 1909 and a modern free translation in Spanish. Bíblia Livre in Portuguese. And new this week: the Chinese Union Version (和合本) — the translation Chinese churches have read for a century — in both Simplified and Traditional script. The two editions differ in more than script: Simplified is the Shen (神) edition and Traditional is the Shangdi (上帝) edition, and we kept each one exactly as published, down to the full-width space the 1919 typesetters set before God’s name. The text came from eBible.org; our job was just not to break it.

Bible text and audio are completely free. No paywall touches scripture here. Free Bible audio is live and rolling out across the languages we carry. Same with The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous for which I owe my life, and I only publish the public domain versions of, first released in 1939.

The AI study assistant now works in all four languages for the bible. Ask it about faith, forgiveness, or what the Bible says about wine — in English, Spanish, Portuguese, or Chinese — and it answers in your language, quoting your translation word for word, with citations that link straight into the text. It even respects the typography.

Passage pages for every major topic, every translation — thousands of them, cross-linked so you can compare the same verse across versions in one tap. All of it submitted to search engines this week. I’ll be adding the specific audio to those passages once i get all the major languages of the bible up and running.

For transparency: I’m one person building this with AI assistance, learning as I go. The heavy lifting was done by the projects named above; I’m doing the plumbing.

What’s next: audiobooks for the rest of the catalog — that’s most of the remaining roadmap — and more languages after that.

Everything’s at books4free.com. Every chapter free.

— Brando