A free EPUB to audiobook converter with no catch
No account, no upload, no length cap and nothing stamped on the audio. Your computer does the work, which is why it costs nothing to let you do as much of it as you like.
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
- Free
- No account, no limits
- 0 bytes
- Uploaded, ever
- ~1 hour
- For a ten-hour book
Why this one is free
Most free converters are free until the point where they aren't. The limit is usually the second file, or the tenth chapter, or the moment the output arrives with a voice reading out the name of the website every few minutes. The rest are free because the transaction isn't the one you think you're in: you hand over a book, and what comes back is worth less than what was learned about you.
The arrangement here is duller. The speech model runs in your browser, on your processor, using your electricity. There is no server converting anything, so there is no per-conversion cost for anybody to recoup. A hundred people converting books today costs exactly what one person does, which is nothing, because the site is a few static files on a CDN.
The sponsor card at the side of the page pays for the domain. That is the entire business model, and it is visible rather than inferred.
What "no limits" means here
No file size tier, no daily cap, no watermark, no held-back chapters and no trial. The EPUB has to be under 60 MB, which is a practical limit on what a browser tab can hold rather than a commercial one — a 60 MB EPUB is an art book, and almost every novel is under two.
The real cost is time, and it is honest about it. A ten-hour book takes roughly an hour, because it is being made on your laptop rather than in a datacentre. You can close the tab and come back; it writes down where it got to and carries on.
Where to get books to convert
Anything DRM-free works. Project Gutenberg has around seventy thousand out-of-copyright books, and Standard Ebooks takes the same texts and typesets them properly, which produces noticeably better chapter detection. Books bought from most independent shops are DRM-free too.
Kindle and Kobo purchases are encrypted, and encrypted means there is no text to read. We check before you start rather than handing you an hour of silence.
Questions
What's the catch?
Your computer does the work, so it costs us nothing to let you do it. There is no server rendering your audio, no queue to pay for and no storage bill, because the file never arrives anywhere. The page is static and the sponsor at the side pays for the domain. That is the whole arrangement.
Is there a length limit or a watermark?
No to both. A twenty-hour book is fine and comes out the same as a twenty-minute one. Nothing is stamped on the audio, no chapter is held back, and there is no trial that expires. The only real limit is that a very long book takes a while, and we tell you how long before you start.
Do I need an account?
There is nothing to sign up to. No email, no password, no verification link. Drop a file on the page and it starts. Because nothing is stored, there is nothing to log in and retrieve later — the audio arrives in your downloads folder and that is where it lives.
Will it stay free?
The cost of running it does not grow with the number of people using it, which is the usual reason free tools stop being free. A hundred conversions a day cost us exactly what one does. The sponsor card at the side is the business model and there is no plan for a second one.
How is this different from the other free converters?
Most of them upload your book to a server, convert it there and email you a link. That is why they can be fast, and it is also why your book ends up on somebody's disk. Here the conversion happens in the browser tab you are reading this in. You can watch the network go quiet in devtools while it works.
What does it actually produce?
A chaptered M4B with the book's own cover art, which is what audiobook apps want, or a folder of MP3s if your player prefers one file per chapter. Both carry the chapter names from the book's table of contents, so a player can jump between them and remember where you stopped.