The community-based generation of audio narrations for a text-based work leverages collaboration of a community of people to provide human-voiced audio readings. During the community-based generation, a collection of audio recordings for the text-based work may be collected from multiple human readers in a community. An audio recording for each section in the text-based work may be selected from the collection of audio recordings. The selected audio recordings may be then combined to produce an audio reading of at least a portion of the text-based work.