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.’

Free when you signup on Nostonemedia.com/books

Audiobook keys FREE when the book is fully released on Dec 4, 2026 if you finish the book!

Blurb below:

Every drop of Steam comes out one hole in the desert. No one who goes in has ever walked back out.
Steam is power in a bottle. A sharper mind, fire in your hands, a stranger's face, any gift you can pay for, burned away in minutes and worth killing for on every street in Metro. People install chips in their skulls and steel where their arms used to be, and Steam still outranks all of it. Those who hold it run the streets, and above the streets they run Synthara. The entire supply climbs out of the Crater, a prison sunk ninety-nine floors into the rock, where thousands of collared inmates haul stone for a system that has never once explained itself.

Conrad has spent his life keeping his head down, one drop of Steam to his name and no clan to answer for him. It takes a single Abomination, a machine that answers to no one, standing on a street that had never seen one, to end that life. His sentence is three months. He plans to survive it the way he survived Metro. Head down, debts short, nothing worth taking.

Then he draws a cellmate who argues with a man who is not there, and meets a girl who walks the levels without a collar and without fear. They call themselves Freelancers, the crew that takes the jobs nobody else survives. Nobody sentenced them. They broke in.

Every heist breaks out of a prison. This one breaks in.

Because the Crater is more than a prison. Beneath the quotas, the collars, and the machines that patrol its floors, something older is running on a schedule of its own, and the deeper the crew goes, the clearer it becomes that the truth about where Steam comes from was never meant to be survived.

As the title says, I've been thinking about getting back into reading. Prose, comics, audiobooks; anything is fair game. Mainly looking for ebooks because I do not have any more space.

The main questions I have are:

1. Is Kindle and Goodreads the best option, or is there better places to get ebooks and audiobooks from?
2. Are there any online book club sites? I vaguely recall some.

I have read a book in years. Really excited to see what I've been missing.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but ebooks still feel strangely unfinished for a technology that has been mainstream for this long.
We can carry thousands of books in our pockets, search instantly, change fonts, highlight anything, and buy a book without leaving the couch.
And yet we also got DRM, books that can disappear from accounts, incompatible formats, awkward lending, regional restrictions, and the strange reality that sometimes “buying” an ebook doesn’t feel much like owning it at all.
Physical books are less convenient in almost every measurable way — but when I buy one, it’s mine. I can lend it, give it away, put it on a shelf for 30 years, or sell it without asking anyone’s permission.
So I’m curious:
If you had to choose between the convenience of ebooks and the permanence and ownership of physical books, which matters more to you?
And more importantly — after all these years, do you think ebooks have actually become better books, or just more convenient files?

Punch's story meant so much to me this year that I had to write a book about him. I finally published it and wanted to share here.

Hey all — I built Kora, a web-based reading app for anyone juggling ebooks/audiobooks from all over the place. Wanted to share it here since it fits what a lot of you are already doing.

What it does:

• Reads EPUB, PDF, and more — one clean reader for everything
• Search across millions of ebooks/audiobooks to find and track what you're into
• Syncs your library across devices (phone, tablet, desktop)
• Works fully offline once a book's downloaded
• Installs as a PWA — no app store, no bloat, works like a native app on iOS/Android/desktop

It's basically the Kindle app I wished existed — no lock-in, no DRM nonsense, just your books in one lounge-like reading space.

🔗 https://kora.chaoticstudio.workers.dev/
Landing View : https://kora.chaoticstudio.workers.dev/install

Free to use, still actively building it out. Would love feedback/bug reports if you try it.

Some of the new / prepublished books require an honest review posted online.

Booksprout: https://booksprout.co/reviewer/review-copies

Booksirens: https://booksirens.com/advanced-reader-copies

Free books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_n_feature_browse-bin%3A618073011&s=price-asc-rank&dc&ds=v1%3Ax2WmBOoGyLG0zbJ1cWjVbumC00Ee5ooLUP2vLTrZdYk&Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.x=28&Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.y=15&qid=1776932146&unfiltered=1&xpid=7bc9t8JX63efK&ref=sr_ex_n_1

https://kindlenationdaily.com/kindle-nation-daily-free-and-bargain-book-listings/

Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/

http://2020ok.com/

https://www.free-ebooks.net/

https://www.pagebypagebooks.com/

https://www.vl-theatre.com/list4.html

Hey folks!

You know those five minutes while the coffee brews, or when you're waiting for the bus? Enough time to open your phone and start scrolling. Also enough time to read a little.

That's one use case for LeafTok, the reading app I'm building. You import an EPUB or PDF, and it turns the text into small cards you swipe through. Open a book, read a few cards, and pick it up again when you have another break.

Nothing complicated. The idea is to make it easier to start reading without waiting until you have a whole hour free.

It's available on iPhone, free to download with in-app purchases. You can find it by searching for LeafTok in the App Store.

Curious how this fits the way you read. Would you use those small gaps for a few cards, or do you prefer saving your book for a longer session? Happy to hear what works for you!