cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5008586

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.

  • hedgehog@ttrpg.network
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    16 hours ago

    If you want to generate audiobooks using your own / a hosted TTS server, check out one of these options:

    If you don’t have a decent GPU, Kokoro is a great option as it’s fast enough to run on CPU and still sounds very good.

    If you’re going to use Kokoro, Audiblez (posted by another commenter) looks like it makes that more of an all-in-one option.

    If you want something that you can use without an upfront building of the audiobook, of the above options, only OpenReader-WebUI supports that. RealtimeTTS is a library that handles that, but I don’t know if there are already any apps out there that integrate it.

    If you have the audiobook generation handled and just want to be able to follow along with text / switch between text and audio, check out https://storyteller-platform.gitlab.io/storyteller/