I built an iOS app that turns EPUBs into audiobooks
Details
- External ID
- 47142296
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I built an iOS app that turns EPUBs into audiobooks
- Website domain
- apple.com
- Launched
- Feb. 24, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 6
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.28099730458221023
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
I had a bunch of ebooks with no audiobook version available. So I built an iOS app that converts EPUB files into audiobooks using text-to-speech.Two voice options: - Free on-device voices (processed locally, no server needed) - Natural cloud voices (one-time purchase per book, no subscription)Cloud conversion runs chunk by chunk. You can start listening other chapters generate in the background. Once done, the audiobook lives on your device.No account required. No subscription. You import your own EPUBs and either use device TTS for free or pay per book for the cloud voices.Nothing stored on backend, neither books or audio files.
Enrichment
- Theme
- ai storytelling and children's education
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- Content generation
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- AI feature
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- convert epub files to audiobooks
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes The app is an iOS wrapper combining standard EPUB parsing libraries with Apple's native AVFoundation/AVSpeechSynthesizer or third-party cloud TTS APIs (like ElevenLabs or OpenAI) alongside standard audio player controls.
Discussion
3 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Speechify
Concerns raised: AI narration loses nuances and quality compared to professional audiobooks, Showcasing books that already have audiobooks available undermines value proposition
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 181 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #166 of 182 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 111 days after the earliest competitor.
- SnowReader · ph · 2026-09-09 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.66
- Heard for iOS: ePub reader with on-device text to speech · hn · 2026-07-15 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.62
- OBook Text To Speech · ph · 2026-09-26 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.61
- BookVoice Kids — Turn Books Into Audio · ph · 2026-09-06 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- DualBook · ph · 2026-09-10 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Folio · ph · 2026-09-06 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Maryanne: read or listen to ebook & PDF · ph · 2026-09-23 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Read while you listen to your Audiobooks · hn · 2026-09-26 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.50
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a content generation tool for Government yet.