Listen to an EPUB
Some books you would rather hear than read. This turns an EPUB you already own into a narrated file you can take into the car, the gym or the washing up.
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
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- Audio
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- On this machine
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- Output
Reading the book…
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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
- Offline
- After the first run
- 0 bytes
- Uploaded, ever
The quick way, if you only want it now
Both iOS and Android will read an ebook aloud with their built-in screen reader, and it costs nothing to try. On iOS it is Spoken Content in Accessibility; on Android it is Select to Speak or TalkBack. If you want twenty minutes of a book read to you while you cook, that is the answer and you can stop reading here.
Why a file is better for a whole book
Screen readers stop when you leave the app or the screen locks. There are no chapter marks, so losing your place means scrolling. They keep the screen awake, which flattens a battery. And they cannot follow you into a car.
A file has none of those problems. It plays with the screen off, keeps your place, skips by chapter, works in CarPlay and Android Auto, and can be copied to any device you own.
What it costs
A few hours of your computer’s time. The narration is generated here rather than on a server, so a ten-hour book is roughly an hour of work on an ordinary card. We measure yours on a few paragraphs first and tell you the real number before you commit.
The book itself never goes anywhere. There is no upload endpoint and no account, so there is nothing to delete afterwards and nobody to trust.
Where to find books that work
Anything DRM-free. Project Gutenberg has around seventy thousand out-of-copyright titles, and Standard Ebooks re-typesets the best of them properly. Many publishers sell DRM-free EPUBs directly, and a good number of technical publishers do it as standard.
Questions
Can I just have it read aloud without downloading anything?
Your device probably already can. Both iOS and Android have a built-in screen reader that will read an ebook out loud in whatever app you are using. It sounds worse and you cannot take it with you, but it costs nothing and starts immediately.
So why make a file at all?
Because a screen reader stops when you leave the app, cannot be listened to in the car, has no chapter marks, and drains the battery. A file plays anywhere, keeps your place, and works with the screen off.
How good does it sound?
Better than a screen reader by some distance. Sentence rhythm comes out right and emphasis usually lands. It is not an actor, so no character voices, and dialogue-heavy fiction is still better with a human narrator.
Is this legal?
For a book you own and keep to yourself, generally yes, and text-to-speech for personal use is well established. Distributing what comes out is a different matter, and audiobook rights are often sold separately from print. Keep it to yourself.
What about books bought from Kindle or Kobo?
Those have DRM, which encrypts the text, so there is nothing for us to read. We detect it and say so before you start. DRM-free EPUBs work fine, including everything from Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks.