This is similar to an earlier post of mine, when I was looking for a different podcast manager, and it’s the same basic problem. Librivox offers a wealth of great public domain content, in addition to copyrighted materials that you can buy, but like the BeyondPod podcast manager, it loses focus when paused; and this means you can’t resume playback without waking up the screen (and looking at it). Since the free material is public domain, I’m wondering if there’s any alternative app I can use?
I use the public domain content on Librivox all the time. I wasn’t even aware they have an app.
I’m not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but when I find a book, I go to Apple Podcasts, search, (e.g.: “Librivox Sherlock Holmes”) download and play it through Apple. Every Librivox book I’ve ever looked for was available in Apple. I’m sure Google would also have it.
Also, the option also exists to download the book onto your computer directly from the Librivox website. You then import it into iTunes and play it as a “spoken word” file (I synch / back-up my iPhone to my MacBook) . I did this for a while, but I prefer to use Podcasts since it has the option to speed the audio if the book if it’s boring. iTunes doesn’t have that.
On a side note, has Librivox gotten more professional-sounding readers? I gave up on them ten years ago, when I kept getting narrators that sounded like a boring teacher (or the one Sherlock collection that I swear was read by a retired acturial accountant).
But maybe I should give them another try.
A friend said “You’ve gotta find the one or two narrators that do a good job and you like, then listen to everything they’ve read.”
So any recommendations?
Some of the readers are still hilariously awful, many are just practicing their english. 
So, yes they still have all that crap on their site, but they also have more readers of the same books. A lot of the novels now have multiple reader options to pick from.
If you go to their site and do a search for a specific book, it lists all the reader options below it and lets you preview them. After downloading a couple of books that were unlistenable (repeated laughable mispronunciations etc), I preview everything now and make a note of the reader I like and then make sure I download that version in my Apple podcast app.
For a specific recommendation, for Sherlock Holmes novels, there was a reader named David Clarke, he’s “Version 4”
Speaking of bad readers, I remember the one who read “Psmith In The City”, by the celebrated English humorist P. J. “Pajamas” Wodehouse.
And I can’t complain, because the readers are doing it solely out of the goodness of their hearts.
Ahh, yes, the guy who kept pronouncing the P . . .