Most books never get an audiobook edition, and commercial conversions charge per book. With a modern neural TTS pipeline you can convert your own epubs into serialized audiobooks for free — and start listening minutes after upload.
A raw 10-hour MP3 is unusable on a run. listenwhilerunning splits each book into chapter-sized episodes (~10 minutes each) with per-episode AI summaries, so your player shows a proper series: resume where you left off, skim what each part covers, jump around freely.
Audio generation runs roughly 10x faster than playback. Upload an epub from your phone; the first episode is ready in a few minutes, and you can listen while the rest of the book generates — you'll never catch up to it. A 200-page book completes in about 2–3 hours in the background.
Before episode one, the pipeline generates a bonus episode where two AI hosts discuss the book: what it argues, why it's worth your time, and what questions to keep in mind. It's a surprisingly good way to decide whether to commit ten hours to a book.
The pipeline detects the book's language and picks a matching neural voice automatically. There's also a whole-book translation command: feed it an English epub and listen to it as a Chinese audiobook (or configure any language pair your LLM supports).
epub, txt, and html directly. For mobi/azw3, convert to epub first with Calibre (one click).
It uses Microsoft's neural voices (the same family behind Edge's Read Aloud), which are close to human narration for most prose. For commercial use you can swap in any TTS provider via a small interface.
Converting books you own for personal listening is generally fine. The tool is self-hosted and private by design — your files never leave your own storage.