this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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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] 8 points 12 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 17 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago

If they’re books that have an existing audiobook version I can’t recommend the mya tracker enough. They’re nice and helpful and it’s no problem to seed up a good ratio with minuscule audiobook files.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

The library

There’s probably some ai out there that can read your ebooks out loud

[–] [email protected] 1 points 19 hours ago

An app called Readest

[–] [email protected] 7 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

It'd be a decent idea to xpost this to !Lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy

Folks there usually have good resources for ebook and audiobook piracy, there's been a couple posts this month about it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Good idea - how do I crosspost lmao

[–] [email protected] 2 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

It's the button under your post title that looks like 2 squares overlapping if you're on the default lemmy UI, otherwise ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[–] [email protected] 2 points 19 hours ago

Done, thank you!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

I use Audiobook Shelf for hosting and listening to books, it's a nice piece of software.

https://www.audiobookshelf.org/

It's not a source of books itself, just the software.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I’ve been meaning to look into Audiobook Shelf! Do you happen to know if it can be integrated with a TTS provider to narrate your ebooks, or does it only support listening to audiobooks you’ve uploaded?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 hours ago

Not sure if it does TTS for ebooks. I usually just uploaded to Google Play Books and use it's TTS.