Questions

No. The voice runs inside your browser tab and reads the file straight off your disk. If you'd rather check than take our word for it, open devtools, watch the Network tab, and convert something. Once the voice itself has downloaded, the network goes quiet and stays quiet.

About an hour for a ten-hour book, on an ordinary laptop. It runs roughly ten times faster than the audio it produces, and it does that on the processor you already have — no graphics card involved. We time your machine on a few paragraphs first and show you the real number before you commit to anything, and you can shut the tab and come back later.

Because your computer is doing the work rather than somebody's server. Anything that hands you a ten-hour audiobook four minutes after you upload it has your book sitting in a datacentre, and a copy of it stays there. An hour of your laptop working quietly in a background tab is the whole price of that not happening.

A good synthetic narrator. The rhythm of a sentence comes out right, the emphasis usually lands, and nothing about it makes you wince. It is not an actor. There are no character voices, and dialogue-heavy fiction still belongs to human narrators. Non-fiction and plain prose come out well.

M4B if your player takes it, which most audiobook apps do. One file, chapter marks, and it remembers where you got to. Pick the MP3 folder for a car stereo, an older player, or a media server that prefers one file per chapter.

No, and you do not need a graphics card. The voice runs on an ordinary processor and still finishes a ten-hour book in about an hour. A faster machine is quicker, an older one slower, and we measure yours on a few paragraphs and tell you the number before you start rather than after.

Not if it has DRM on it, and there's no way round that. Those files are encrypted, so there's no text in them to read. We check before you start rather than handing you an hour of silence. A DRM-free EPUB is fine.

Nothing is lost. Your progress is written down every few seconds. Come back, pick the same file, and it carries on from the chapter it was on. The finished audio gets assembled at the end out of pieces that were already done, so stopping costs you nothing.

After the first run, yes. The voice has to come down once, a few hundred megabytes of it, and your browser hangs onto it after that. From then on you can pull the plug and carry on.

That's between you and whoever holds the copyright. We never see the file. Making an audiobook out of something you have no right to copy is still infringement, and audiobook rights are often sold separately from print. Stick to what's yours.