Most books never get an official audiobook. Here's the practical, zero-subscription way to convert the books you own into listenable audio, using an open-source pipeline and free neural voices.
epub, txt, or html work directly. If your book is mobi/azw3 (Kindle), open it in the free Calibre and convert to epub — one click.
After a one-command setup (npm run setup on any machine with a free Cloudflare account), you get a private web player. Open its settings page on your phone, pick the file, tap upload. That's the whole workflow from then on.
Conversion runs ~10x faster than playback: the first ~10-minute episode is ready in a couple of minutes and the rest of the book fills in behind you. Episodes appear in the player and in any podcast app subscribed to your private feed.
The pipeline is open source (AGPL-3.0) and fits in Cloudflare's free tier; the default neural voices are free for personal use. The only optional cost is pennies of LLM usage for summaries.
Roughly 2–3 hours for a 200-page book, but you can start listening after the first few minutes.
Format-shifting books you own for personal use is generally considered fine in most jurisdictions. Everything stays in your own private storage.