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I had found a way to listen to audiobooks for free, now it's paywalled - seeking suggestions (hexbear.net)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Used to use ElevenReader to upload ebook files and listen to them for free - it was too good to be true, and as of today they are now limiting monthly listening time.

Ironically, the last book I listened to with it was The Dubious Battle, which was based on a user's recommendation from this site! I enjoyed it a lot and am planning on getting through more of Steinbeck's work.

Libby is great but I don't need the feds looking at what I'm listening to.

Librivox is also great BUT limited to public domain books, plus the audio files are huge (as expected).

For now I'm back to Librera FD and its use of google's voice/TTS engine. I have found alternatives for this that I can re-research and link here, but it leaves a lot to be desired.

I'm on Android and have followed the app A Book's Story closely since there was discussion of implementing the Android TTS engine, but no dice there.

Suggestions welcome! I would cruise through a few books a month this way and want to keep up the momentum and hopefully help others with these methods.

I have intermediate coding skills if there are projects I could take a look at as well.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 23 hours ago

I use voice dream reader to read ebooks to me. The quality isn't up to professional human readers but it's better than librivox IMO. I paid $5 for one of their premium voices (Peter AKA peetah) and never regretted it. The app will read any ebook you upload to it. Not sure if it's available on android.