Alternatives
Products that do what I built Libris.fm – 10000+ free, human-narrated audiobooks does
Hi HN, I'm the creator of Libris.fm. I've been a long-time fan of audiobooks, especially classic literature found in the public domain. I wanted a simple, dedicated app to listen to these works narrated by real people, without any distractions. Libris.fm brings together over 10,000 human-narrated audiobooks, primarily sourced from LibriVox and the Internet Archive. Key points: Completely Free: No subscriptions or paywalls. No Ads & No Tracking: Built with privacy in mind. Just the books. Human Narration: Focused specifically on volunteer-read recordings, not synthetic voices. Simple…
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Hey HN. I’m Ivan, hacker from Ukraine. For about a year, I was working on Listenly — an app to listen to text content with OpenAI's natural-sounding text-to-speech model. At some moment, I realized that it would be cool to take all the public domain e-books and create audio versions for them. So I did it... kind-of. It would cost an immense amount of money to generate all the audio right away (OpenAI TTS costs approximately $0.84/hour of audio; 11labs, for comparison, is 10 times more expensive). So, I took a more gradual approach. I took all the metadata from the Project Gutenberg…
2024 · listenly.io
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I noticed that many websites offering free audiobooks tend to have clunky search functionality, making it harder to find what you're looking for. To address this, I’ve created a site that aggregates audiobooks from multiple platforms—complete with book reviews and ratings—making it easier to discover and explore new titles. At the moment, I've included audiobooks from popular sources like Librivox, Project Gutenberg, and Lit2Go. I'm open to suggestions on additional free audiobook sources I could integrate into the site to expand the collection!
2025 · booksearch.party
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Hi HN, Like many of you, I found myself discovering dozens of great posts on HN and never actually finding the time read them. I used to save every cool link to Pocket, but… well… same story — I rarely found the time to read them. So I thought it'd be great to listen to the top articles, the same way I listen to podcasts. Initially, I tried out narrating articles with latest text-to-speech synthesis from Amazon and Google, but it was still pretty bad. Especially with long form content. So I thought I'll do this with real humans, real voice actors. So I made ReadByHumans. [1] We are starting…
2017
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QuickPiperAudiobook locally generates an mp3 audiobook on Linux with one easy command. It can convert PDFs, epub, mobi, and many more by using ebook-convert. It uses any piper TTS model, and thus supports a wide variety of languages. I've had great success using it to read more while reducing eye strain and computer usage. I think I've probably read 30 or so books this way now over the past year. Being able to listen to any content you want in audio form free and offline while going for a walk is extremely handy. I hope it helps you as well! Cheers
2024 · github.com
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Hi HN! I'm stoked to share a project I've been working on called PDF to Podcast. It's a free, open-source tool that automatically converts PDF documents into engaging, informative podcast-style audio content using large language models and text-to-speech tech. Inspiration: The idea for this project came from the NotebookLM demo at Google I/O, where they showcased generating audio dialogue from uploaded PDFs and other sources. However, that audio feature hasn't been publicly released yet, and I wanted to challenge myself to build something similar using existing tools and APIs. How it…
2024 · pdf-to-podcast.com
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http://bit.ly/2qeHLev I’ve wanted to listen to my favorite articles or web novels and switch seamlessly between the audio and text so I can read, and if I want to cook or whatever else, I can continue off the audio. I could not find it anywhere, so I created one: http://bit.ly/2qeHLev. Click on the audio version, scrub the player and scroll the content to test it out. All of it is done programatically, so it works with anyone's voice. Also, it works on the mobile web so feel free to check it out on your phone. What do you guys think about my side project? I'd…
2017
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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…
Feb 2026 · apps.apple.com
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I'm Seth, creator of discourse.fm, a browser-based tool/platform to create live audio chat rooms. I just launched an extension of the site - https://hackernews.discourse.fm/ - which pulls stories in real-time from the HN site using the public API, and enables anyone to join a live audio discussion about the story (think Clubhouse rooms autogenerated for HN stories). Once you enter a room, you can grab the link generated for a room and paste it back to the comments on the HN story to invite more participants. hackernews.discourse.fm is both a full-fledged product and a…
2021
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2018 · audiobookreviews.com
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2018 · txtpen.com
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Mar 2026 · discovox.org
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2019 · auditus.cc
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Hey so I am making my own book reader and wanted to share it with y'all on hackernews and I saw a submission talking about DRM free books[0] so I decided to submit this submission on Hackernews to show what I am upto :-D I prefer minimalism so I have created three different flavors of it depending upon the particular use-cases and I have linked the most minimalist one as the submission. If someone is interested in a Epub/pdf reader, I have recently made one: https://epub.mirror.forum/ After making that, I was also feeling the need of having standard book downloads and…
Jun 2026 · epub.mirror.forum
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For a while I've wanted to try out the new AI voices for long-form narration, but everything I found required a subscription that didn't justify my limited usage. I came across the open Kokoro model [0] and the voices are very good -- good enough to listen to for hours without the fatigue I got from legacy, robotic TTS voices. The model is 82m parameters and designed to run fast, but I still struggled to get reasonable times from CPU inference on my 12-core laptop. I thought a cloud-based GPU service would let me generate audiobooks fast enough to feed my own self-hosted library, and that…
Jun 2026 · ebookaloud.com
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