I generated 70k audiobooks with OpenAI Text-to-Speech
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…
In plain words
Listenly is an app that converts public domain e-books from Project Gutenberg into audiobooks using OpenAI's text-to-speech technology. Users can browse a catalog of approximately 70,000 books and listen to them on-demand, with audio generated gradually as users access each title rather than all at once. The app is designed for people who prefer audio versions of classic literature and other public domain texts.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
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 catalog (it's about 70GB of dirty XML), cleaned it, put it into my database, and created a browsable catalog. When the first user visits a book page on Listenly, I download the full text of the book, save it in my cloud storage, and calculate the price for audio generation based on the book's length. Then, if the user decides to purchase it, we generate the audio. I know it’s not perfect. I've burned out a couple of times already while doing it. But still, I need to show it to the world. And I’ll be glad to hear your feedback. Peace.
More growth this month
the category →
AstraPixels▲267A pixel-art solar system at its real current positions.
Growth · 29d ago · astrapixels.com
Launched alongside, July 2024
the whole month →
- IC
Many years ago, I made VJ softwares (to mix live visuals in clubs) for unexpected platforms like the Game Boy Advance, the Playstation 2 and the Raspberry Pi. This year, I’m back with a new web-app: Pikimov. Inspired by Photopea (a free Photoshop clone), I created this web-based motion design & video editor as an alternative to After Effects, to fill empty void. It's free, without signup, without cloud uploads (your files stay on your machine), and your projects are not used for AI models training.
AI · 2024 · pikimov.com
