NPR's Book of the Day Podcast Transcripts

NPR · 1,334 episodes with transcripts

In need of a good read? Or just want to keep up with the books everyone's talking about? NPR's Book of the Day gives you today's very best writing in a snackable, skimmable, pocket-sized podcast.

Spoken has transcripts of 1,334 NPR's Book of the Day episodes, with the speakers named. The newest listed here is from October 9, 2026.

Books Arts

Every NPR's Book of the Day transcript in one script

1,334 episodes of NPR's Book of the Day have transcripts. Fetch them all as speaker-labeled Markdown in one script — 1 credit each, and re-fetching one you already have is free:

archive.sh

curl -s -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
  https://spoken.md/podcasts/1587369865/episodes \
  | jq -r '.episodes[] | "\(.id) \(.title)"' \
  | while IFS=' ' read -r id title; do
      slug=$(echo "$title" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | tr -cs 'a-z0-9' '-' | sed 's/-*$//')
      [ -f "${id}-${slug}.md" ] && continue
      curl -sf -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
        -o "${id}-${slug}.md" \
        https://spoken.md/transcripts/$id || rm -f "${id}-${slug}.md"
      sleep 0.34
    done

Already-saved files are skipped — safe to re-run after a top-up.

1,334 credits. Credits never expire. Excludes VAT, added at checkout for EU customers.

Latest NPR's Book of the Day transcripts

Lois Lowry on 'Building 903,' 'The Giver' and relationships between the old and young

October 9, 2026

Andrew Limbong (0:02)

Hey, it's MPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Louis Lowry is on the pod today. You know the name. She's written dozens of books for kids and young adults. There's a historical fiction book, Number the Stars, about the Holocaust, on the lighter side of things. There's the Anastasia Krupnik series. And of…

Building 903 takes place in 2099, a sort of despotic ruler named Zulkiris is in charge. There's a lot of no's in this world. No music, no pets, no art, no books.

Lois Lowry (1:07)

Well, obviously 2099 is a long way from now. I can't do the math quickly, but it's quite a distance into the future, and things have greatly changed, largely because a leader has become an autocrat and has found a way to corrupt the electoral system, and has been elected for many, many decades. It's fair to assume…

And so the people hate him, but they don't know how to get rid of him. And over the decades, he has changed the way the world works. He has changed to, in my opinion, their detriment. But some things perhaps might be good. It's interesting to speculate what might work in the future and what might not. And all of…

Andrew Limbong (2:03)

Were you thinking about anything going on in the real world as you were imagining up this?

Keep reading this transcript

Lois Lowry on 'Building 903,' 'The Giver' and relationships between the old and youngOctober 9, 2026

These are examples, not the full list — see everything available from this show via the API, get started.

Looking for a different show? Search for it to see whether it has transcripts you can fetch.

Thousands of transcripts fetched by people building searchable podcast archives

Any NPR's Book of the Day episode comes back as Markdown with the speakers named, one credit each.

request

curl -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
  https://spoken.md/transcripts/1000793979694

No subscription. Credits never expire. Prices exclude VAT, added at checkout for EU customers. Try free with pt_demo.