Abogen – Generate audiobooks from EPUBs, PDFs and text

Nice!

As an aside, while this tool can be used to create an audiobook from a book you have in text format, for your private consumption, having an author employ something like this to create files for distribution is extremely risky, even if they acknowledge its use and intend those files to only be available on their website.

Indie authors struggle a lot to promote their works, and the new normal is that potential readers, the polite ones[^1], use the slightest hint of AI usage to discard their title and move on...as they are entitled to, since there are so many books.

I in particular have started to hire voice actors that have good acting skills and good diction but for whom English is their second language, or it's their first language but they speak something else at home; sometimes I even ask them to go a notch up with their accents. It helps with the non-AI recognition, and it also increases the appeal of the book for people who would like to try out something new. Once, I did an audition for a project and was pleasantly surprised with how much life people from around the Mediterranean basin were able to inject into their renderings, compared with people from Britain and North America.

[^1] Impolite readers set the town on fire, and then go about and spread that fire to neighboring towns, for good measure.

Does it turn it into spoken word or an audiobook? Because good audiobooks often have voice actors that read the characters with different emphasis and dialects. I imagine tools like chatgpt could do this for a few sentences but what about an 8-20 hour audiobook?

I think there are still basic hurdles to take before we can go epub to audiobook in a quality that can compete with current state of the art.

Or am I missing something?

I tried Kokoro for voicing blog posts and articles and wasn't impressed to be honest. Right now Gemini 2.5 Flash TTS is a much more capable system with generous free limits (about 10 minutes per generation and about 90 minutes per day). Voices are not very consistent between generations, but for shorter pieces it's not a big deal (but will obviously be for books)

I've been using Kokoro TTS with the CLI app, audiblez, mentioned in the "Similar Projects" section of the README. The model is fast and delivers impressive quality for its small size. Some issues I have faced, however, are: a) It doesn't distinguish periods at the end of sentences from the dots in abbreviations such as "Mr." or "Mrs." The result is an awkward pause between "Mr." and the name. b) It doesn't handle ellipses well. c) Words are pronounced the same way regardless of context.

I think the quality of the voice is super important for audiobooks and I think we are just closing in on the required quality with TTS.

I played a bit with Eleven labs voices and while they aren't bad when I tried make them read fragment of a text that I wrote, it sounded chaotic, boring, quite terrible, for anything longer than a sentence or two. But when I tried their v3 voices which they are currently in the process of rolling out, the same text sounded consistent, emotional, engaging, simply amazing. I think we are just crossing vocal uncanny valley.

The demo video doesn't seem to have any audio in it! At least none that either ffmpeg or whatever Firefox uses can recognize.

can I choose any voice? would love to read software engineering books in voice of Morgan Freeman, or maybe even better, Scarlett Johansson