How to listen to an ebook you already own
Most books never get an audiobook edition. If you own the ebook, you can listen to it tonight, in a voice you choose, entirely offline.
In short: The ebook is already yours and nobody is going to record it. Generated ahead of time, it behaves like an audiobook that does exist.
Only a fraction of books ever get an audiobook edition. Backlist novels, technical books, translated fiction, anything academic, anything published by somebody small — mostly not recorded, and unlikely to be. When they do exist they often cost more than the book did.
Meanwhile the ebook is already on your drive, and it is all words.
Adding a book
Drag it in. On a Mac you can also point the app at a folder and it will take the whole shelf at once, filed together under the folder's name, and tell you what it skipped.
One thing to know before you start: books bought from Kindle or Apple Books are locked to those apps and will not open here. Books you own outright will.
What makes a book listenable rather than just narrated
Getting a voice to say the words is easy. Nearly anything can do it. The difference between that and something you will actually finish a novel with is a handful of unglamorous things.
It knows what page you are on. Not a percentage, and not a guess based on how many letters have gone by — an actual page count worked out from how the book lays out on your screen at your font size. So "page 214 of 388" means what it says, and it still means it after you change the typeface.
Come back a week later and it is on the same sentence. Not the same chapter, not the same rough position. The sentence.
Tap anything to start there. Any sentence, any chapter. If you drift off and lose the thread, you scroll back and tap the last thing you remember.
The word being spoken lights up. Which sounds like a small thing until you are reading something dense, or reading in a second language, and you realise you have been following along rather than half-listening.
The sleep timer can stop at the end of the chapter. There are the usual fifteen, thirty, forty-five and sixty minute options, and a custom one — but stopping at the chapter break is the one that means you do not wake up eleven chapters downstream with no idea where you lost it.
It looks like a book. Four appearances, including a proper dark one for reading at night, plus serif or sans, and a column width that suits your eyes rather than your monitor.
Your book stays yours
Ebooks are web pages in a trench coat, and a surprising number of them contain things that would like to talk to a server — a tracking pixel in a chapter heading, a font pulled from somewhere, an image hosted elsewhere.
Books opened here cannot do any of that. The publisher's own design, fonts and images all render exactly as intended, because they are inside the file. Anything reaching outward simply does not connect.
Neither does the reading. The voice is generated on your Mac or iPhone, so nothing about what you are reading, where you are in it, or how long you spent on chapter nine goes anywhere at all. There is no account to make.
Turn a book into an actual audiobook
This is the part most people do not realise is possible.
You can have the whole book — or one chapter, or just from where you are — generated ahead of time. It takes a few minutes for a novel. After that the audio exists on your device, so it plays instantly, with no connection, and without pausing to think mid-sentence.
Then you can save the result as a real audiobook file. Not a wall of audio: a proper audiobook with the chapters marked, the title and author attached, and the cover on it. It turns up in whatever you normally listen to audiobooks in, with the chapter list intact, and it remembers your place there too.
Which means the thing you started as an ebook nobody bothered to record ends up behaving exactly like one that somebody did.
The case for doing this at all
A long flight. A drive. A commute where reading makes you queasy. An eight-hundred-page novel you have restarted three times. A textbook you have to get through twice.
The book is already yours. Nobody is going to record it. This is the next best thing, and it is closer to the real thing than it has any right to be.
If it is papers rather than books you are drowning in, that is a slightly different problem. And if you are comparing this against the other options, here is how they stack up.