Every question
you might have.
Answered honestly.

The Living Library is a voice preservation platform. It allows you to record yourself reading books aloud — page by page — so that your family can hear your voice reading their favorite stories, in your accent, with your laughter between the pages, for as long as they live.

Most people start by recording a children's book for a grandchild. Many find themselves, somewhere in the middle of the third page, adding a memory. And then another. The archive grows the way conversations do — one thing leads to another, and before long you've preserved something that no photograph or document could capture.

It is built for grandparents, deployed parents, bilingual families, anyone whose voice carries something that should outlast them.

A smartphone, a tablet, or a computer — and a book you love. That is everything.

You don't need special equipment, a quiet professional studio, or any technical experience. The app works on iOS, Android, and any modern web browser. The microphone built into your phone or laptop is perfectly sufficient. We have found that recordings made in a comfortable chair, in the natural sound of your home, are the ones families treasure most.

Click "Start free" anywhere on voicearchive.net. You'll create an account with your email address and a password. From there, you can immediately begin recording — no payment required for your first recordings.

When you're ready to save your archive and share it with family, you'll choose a plan. Founding members — the first 500 families — get three months free, then continue at $4.99/month with that rate locked for your first year.

Not at all. The Living Library serves anyone whose voice carries something irreplaceable.

• Grandparents reading to grandchildren — the core use case
• Deployed parents recording bedtime stories before leaving
• Grandmothers recording in their native language for grandchildren learning it
• Authors recording their own work in their own voice
• Educators building listening libraries for their classrooms
• Anyone who wants to be known — not just remembered

If you have a story worth telling, the archive is for you.

Open the app and create a new book in your archive. Give it a title and cover — you can photograph your physical copy or search our growing library of titles. Then go page by page: tap the record button, read the page aloud, tap stop. Move to the next page. Repeat.

You can pause, re-record a page, or leave a page unrecorded if you want to come back to it. There's no pressure to do the whole book in one sitting. Many people record a book over several evenings.

After the book, you can add open-ended recordings — a memory the book unlocked, a story only you know, an answer to a question your grandchild hasn't asked yet. These become part of the same archive entry, linked to the book that opened them.

Leave it in. This is the most important advice we can give you.

The stumble, the pause, the quiet laugh when you mispronounce something — that is your voice. That is exactly what your family will listen to long after you are gone. Professional audiobooks are polished and lifeless by comparison. Your recording should sound like you.

That said, if you want to re-record a specific page, you can. Just tap the page again and record over it. The new version replaces the old one.

Yes. Any language, any dialect, any accent. The platform stores audio — it does not transcribe or translate it. A grandmother recording in Tamil, a grandfather in Gujarati, a parent in Haitian Creole — the archive preserves exactly what they say, exactly how they say it.

This is one of the things The Living Library does that nothing else does: it preserves not just the words but the specific music of how someone speaks in the language they think in. That is irreplaceable in a way that a written translation never is.

Yes — and many of our members find that the book is just the beginning.

Within any archive entry, you can add open recordings: a memory, a story, an answer to a question. You can also create standalone archive entries that aren't attached to a book at all — a family history, a song you want them to know, advice for a grandchild who isn't born yet.

The archive is yours. Use it however feels right.

There are three ways, depending on the book:

Books in our catalogue. Search by title or author. If the book is in our growing library, it appears with its cover and page structure ready to record against. We add new titles regularly, and you can request a title through the app.

Books you own physically. If a book isn't in our catalogue, you can add it yourself: enter the title and author, photograph the cover, and record page by page as you hold the physical book in your hands. Your recordings are saved to your private family archive. This is the most common way our members work — it's simple, and it means every book you've ever loved is recordable.

Public domain texts. Classic poetry, Aesop's fables, scripture, folk tales — these are available freely and can be added directly. If you're not sure whether a specific text is in the public domain, a good rule of thumb is that anything published before 1928 in the United States is generally free to use.

Yes — for your private family archive. Reading aloud to your family, and recording that reading for your family's private use, is analogous to reading a bedtime story. Your recording lives in your private archive, accessible only to the family members you invite.

What you cannot do is distribute recordings of copyrighted books publicly or commercially. The Living Library is designed for private family preservation, not public distribution. Our platform enforces this: recordings of copyrighted titles are accessible only within your invited family group.

Yes. Little Bear Finds His Way Home by Chris Culp is available in the Living Library catalogue in English, with Spanish and French editions coming shortly. It is the book that inspired this platform and remains our flagship title. You can find it in the app under Featured Books, or search by title.

The physical book is also available on Amazon — with QR codes that connect directly to the app so that gifting a copy is a natural gateway into the archive.

From your archive, tap "Invite family." You'll receive a Family Code — a short, memorable code — that you share with the people you want to include. They enter the code when they create their account (free for family members you invite) and they immediately have access to everything you've recorded.

Family members can listen on any device, at any time. They can also leave voice responses — a grandchild recording themselves listening to the story, or asking a question back. The archive becomes a conversation across generations.

The Individual plan includes up to 10 family members. The Family plan includes unlimited family members. Family members who access your archive through your invitation do not need their own paid subscription — they listen as your guests.

Your archive is preserved. This is the most important promise we make.

We recommend designating a Legacy Contact in your account settings — a family member who will have the ability to manage the account after you're gone. The Legacy Contact can maintain the subscription, download all recordings, and ensure the archive is accessible to future generations.

We also maintain archive backups independently of subscription status. If a subscription lapses following the death of a member, we hold the archive for 24 months and reach out to the family before any action is taken. We will never delete a family's voice recordings without exhausting every avenue to reach them first.

Yes — and this is the heart of what we do. Your grandchild can open the app, find the book you recorded, and hear your voice reading it to them, at any time, on any device, whether you are in the next room or on the other side of the world.

For young children, the app is designed so that a parent can set up the listening experience and the child simply presses play. The interface on the listening side is intentionally simple.

The Individual plan is $4.99/month or $39.99/year — less than a single cup of coffee per month for something your family will have forever.

The Family plan is $9.99/month and includes unlimited family members and additional tools for building a multi-generational archive.

The physical Little Bear Finds His Way Home book is available separately on Amazon for $24.99, with QR codes connecting directly to the app.

Founding members — the first 500 families — receive three months free, then continue at $4.99/month with that rate locked for the first year.

Yes. Military families receive the annual plan at $25/year — a significant discount from the standard rate. Use code MILITARY25 at checkout. No verification required — we extend this on the honor system and are grateful for your family's service.

The Living Library was partly built with deployed families in mind. The ability to record every book on a bedroom shelf before deployment — so that a child hears a parent's voice reading to them every night they are apart — is one of the things this platform does that nothing else does.

Yes. Cancel anytime from your account settings or through the Billing portal with one click. No cancellation fees, no questions asked. Your recordings remain accessible until the end of your current billing period.

If you cancel and later want to return, your archive will be waiting. We hold recordings for 12 months after cancellation.

Yes — and it is one of the most meaningful gifts we have seen given. Gift subscriptions are available for 3 months ($14.99), 6 months ($29.99), or one year ($39.99). The recipient sets up their own account and begins recording immediately.

Paired with a copy of Little Bear Finds His Way Home from Amazon, a gift subscription becomes a complete "start your archive" kit — beautiful as a birthday or holiday gift for a grandparent, or as a baby shower gift for a family who will want to capture everything from the beginning.

Only the family members you invite. Your archive is completely private by default. Recordings are accessible exclusively to people who have been given your Family Code by you.

VoiceArchive staff do not listen to your recordings. They are encrypted at rest and in transit. We have no commercial interest in your voice or your stories beyond the subscription fee you pay us.

Your recordings are stored on secure cloud infrastructure with redundant backups in multiple geographic locations. We use industry-standard encryption and follow best practices for data security.

Backups run continuously. A recording made today is backed up within minutes and protected against server failure, data corruption, or any single point of failure. Your voice is safer in our archive than on a physical tape or hard drive.

Yes. From any recording in your archive, you can download the audio file in standard MP3 format. You own your recordings. We will never hold them hostage or make them inaccessible.

You can also export your entire archive as a ZIP file containing all recordings, organized by book and date. We recommend doing this periodically as an additional personal backup.

No. Full stop.

Your voice is yours. Your family's stories are your family's stories. We do not use your recordings to train artificial intelligence models, we do not analyze them for commercial purposes, and we do not share them with third parties for any reason. This is in our Terms of Service and it is a commitment we take seriously.

The entire purpose of this platform is to preserve what is irreplaceably human. Using your voice for AI training would be a betrayal of that purpose. We will not do it.

When you refer someone to The Living Library and they become a paying subscriber, you earn 20% of their subscription revenue for five years. That's approximately $1/month per subscriber you refer, for as long as they remain a member.

You receive a unique referral link and code. Every subscriber who comes through your link is tracked to your account. You can log in to your referral dashboard at any time to see how many subscribers you've referred, how much you've earned to date, and what your projected earnings are over the coming year.

Earnings are paid quarterly by bank transfer or PayPal. There is no minimum threshold — if you've earned $3.40, we send you $3.40.

It is. Intentionally.

Most referral programs pay a one-time bounty or a commission for 12–24 months. We believe that if you bring someone into The Living Library — if your recommendation is what causes them to start preserving their family's voice — you deserve to share in the value that relationship creates for as long as it lasts.

Five years is also a signal about what we believe: that this is not a service people try and cancel. It is a service families keep for decades. We want our referral partners to feel that long-term confidence in what they're recommending.

Yes. Your referral dashboard shows you:

• Total subscribers referred (active and historical)
• Revenue earned to date and by quarter
• Projected annual earnings at your current referral rate
• Click-through rate on your referral link
• Your unique referral link and a shareable code for use in any medium

The dashboard is live — it updates as new subscribers come through your link. You don't need to wait for a monthly report to know how your referrals are performing.

Yes — that is exactly what it's designed for. Your referral code can be shared anywhere: in an email newsletter, a social media post, a client newsletter, a professional recommendation, a note card tucked into a gift. There are no restrictions on channel.

If you are a professional — an estate planning attorney, a financial advisor, a senior living activities director — your referral code works the same way. The commission structure is a standard B2B commercial arrangement, not a regulated financial product referral. Please consult your own compliance guidance if you have questions about your specific professional context.

The Living Library pays one referral partner per subscriber — the person whose link or code was used at signup. If you have a network of people you work with and want to share your earnings with them, that is entirely between you and them. We pay you; you manage your own network.

This keeps the arrangement simple and clean. You are not required to disclose sub-arrangements to us, and we are not involved in them. Many of our institutional partners — social media creators with a team, advisors with associates — handle their referral networks this way.

You must be a Living Library subscriber first — we believe referral partners should know what they're recommending from personal experience. Once you have an account, go to Settings → Referral Program and your unique link and code are generated immediately. No application, no approval process.

For institutional partnerships — organizations, professional networks, or high-volume referrers — email partners@voicearchive.net and we'll set you up directly.