How to Listen to Audiobooks Without Swearing
Most audiobooks you’d want to hear have some swearing in them. You have three real options: pick books with less of it, skip it by hand, or use an app that skips it for you. Here is how each one works, and where each falls short.
Option 1: Pick books with less language
The cheapest fix is to know before you start. A content guide tells you how much profanity a book has and where it shows up, so you can decide before you spend a credit or a weekend on it.
Our content guides count every filtered moment in a book by category. A few examples from them:
- A Wrinkle in Time has 2 profanity moments in the whole book.
- Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone has 19.
- Dune has 39.
- Red Rising has 370.
The catch: a lot of the books people actually want to read sit on the heavy end. Picking only light books means skipping a lot of good stories.
Option 2: Skip it by hand
You can jump back or forward when a word comes up. In practice you hear the word before you can react, and it’s impossible while driving. It works for a book with two or three moments. It doesn’t work for a book with two hundred.
Option 3: Use an app that skips it for you
A filtering app knows where every moment is ahead of time and skips past it while you listen. The book is the same recording with the same narrator. Nothing is edited. The app just doesn’t play the parts you chose to filter.
Here is how it works in AudioHaven:
- Choose what to skip. Profanity is one of 9 categories, alongside slurs, blasphemy, violence, sexual content and others. Each has mild, moderate and severe levels.
- Pick individual words if you want. Word-level control lets you skip the f-word and keep “darn.” Most people land somewhere in between.
- Set it once. Your defaults apply to every book and podcast. You can still change the settings for one book without touching the rest.
- Press play. The app skips the moments you chose. A person on our team reviewed every one of them against the audio, so a skip lands on the word, not in the middle of a sentence.
Which books work
AudioHaven has more than 320 modern audiobooks with filters ready, plus public domain classics and podcasts. You can also link Libro.fm, AudiobooksNow or Downpour, or import a DRM-free audiobook file you own. If your book matches one we’ve reviewed, your filters apply right away. In the US you can upload a book we haven’t reviewed, and a person reviews it, usually within 3 days.
What it can’t do: filter books from Audible or Libby, because those books only play inside their own apps.
The short version
If you want to hear the story without the swearing, check a content guide first, and use a filtering app for anything with more than a handful of moments. AudioHaven has a 14-day free trial, so you can try it on the book you’ve been putting off.
