EPUB to MP3
One MP3 per chapter, tagged and covered, in a zip. The format that plays on anything with a speaker, made from your own EPUB without the book leaving your computer.
Local narration unit
Idle
Drop an EPUB here
M4B
With chapters
0
Bytes uploaded
11
Voices
Read aloud in this tab. Never uploaded. Here's why that's true.
book.epub
- —
- Chapters
- —
- Audio
- —
- On this machine
- —
- Output
Reading the book…
—
Close the tab if you want. We keep your place, and picking the same file again carries on from where it stopped.
Paused
Your place is kept.
Your audiobook is ready
Getting it onto a phone
- iPhone. AirDrop it, or copy it into the Books app. Chapters and your position work straight away.
- Android. Copy it across and open it in Smart AudioBook Player, Voice or Listen.
- Plex or Audiobookshelf. Drop it in the library folder.
That didn't work
- MP3
- One file per chapter
- ID3
- Titles, cover, track numbers
- ~29 MB
- Per hour of audio
What you get
A zip containing one MP3 per chapter, numbered in reading order, each tagged so a player can make sense of them. Chapter title, book title, author, track number and the book’s own cover go into every file.
Not one enormous file. A seven-hour MP3 is technically valid and horrible in practice: scrubbing is imprecise, most players lose your place, and skipping back a chapter becomes a guessing game with a progress bar.
When MP3 is the right choice
- A car stereo reading from a USB stick, which will almost certainly refuse M4B.
- An older or cheap player — running or gym players in particular.
- A media server that indexes per file, or a setup you already have working.
- Anywhere you want the audio to be trivially editable afterwards.
When it is the wrong one
If your player handles M4B, take the M4B. One file with real chapter marks that remembers your position is a better listening experience than a folder, and every audiobook app on iOS and Android supports it. MP3 is the compatibility choice, not the good one.
Why the narration takes hours
Because it happens on your computer. A speech model runs in the browser tab, a sentence at a time, on the processor your machine already has. A ten-hour book is roughly an hour of work on a decent laptop.
Anything that returns the same audiobook four minutes after you upload it is running on hardware you are not paying for, which means your book sat on somebody’s server to get there. You wait longer here and nobody else ends up with a copy.
Questions
Do I get one MP3 or several?
One per chapter, in a zip. A single seven-hour MP3 is miserable to navigate, and most players handle a numbered folder far better than they handle scrubbing through one enormous file.
Are the files tagged?
Yes. Each one carries the chapter title, the book title as the album, the author as the artist, a track number and the cover art. That is what makes a player show a tidy list instead of forty rows of filenames.
When should I pick MP3 over M4B?
Car stereos, older MP3 players, cheap sports players, and media servers that prefer one file per chapter. Also anything that flatly refuses M4B. If your player takes M4B, that is the better file.
Will it remember my place?
Only as well as your player does. Position memory is something the M4B format carries and a folder of MP3s cannot. Some players track it themselves per folder, but plenty just start the file again.
How big is the download?
About 29 MB an hour, the same as M4B, so a ten-hour book is near 290 MB zipped. The zip is stored rather than compressed, since MP3 is already compressed and squeezing it again saves nothing and costs time.