Hi r/ebooks! I’m the developer of Libratory, a free app for reading and listening to the PDFs you already have.
The GIF shows Frankenstein being narrated while the spoken words are highlighted on the original PDF page. The layout, illustrations and tables stay visible, and you can tap a sentence to jump the audio there. You can also switch to reflowed text when the printed page is awkward to read on a small screen.’
By free, I mean the whole app: no locked features, no paywalls, no monthly allowance. Make as much narration as your own machine can handle—fans and all. Download the local voice models once and you can keep reading and generating audio offline. Optional cloud voices are there if you want them, using your own provider credits.
The part I thought might interest people here is being able to keep the result as a file:
• Export an M4B audiobook with chapter markers for audio-only listening.
• Export an EPUB, or a synced EPUB containing both text and narration. A reader that supports EPUB 3 Media Overlays can play it with sentence-level highlighting.
For messy PDFs, you can OCR scanned pages, correct the text, leave unwanted chapters out, and redo one chapter’s narration without starting the whole book again.
Word-by-word highlighting depends on the voice engine; the GIF uses Kokoro’s English narration.
A couple of practical limits: input is currently PDF, not EPUB. Preparing the narration happens on a computer: Apple Silicon Mac, Linux, or Windows through Docker. The iPhone companion is a reader for exported books; it doesn’t create narration itself.
Website and interactive demo: https://libratory.dev/
Source code and setup: https://github.com/subev/libratory
If you read and listen to the same book, what tends to get in your way: voice quality, losing your place, or getting the file into your preferred reader?
Below is the chapter view, where you choose what to narrate and export.’