FanFiction.net hosts some of the longest stories on the internet — and the site has never been able to read a single one of them to you. CastReader adds the missing audio layer: open a chapter, press play, and listen in a natural AI voice while each paragraph highlights in sync.
Turn your reading list into a listening list
Harry Potter, Naruto, Marvel, anime crossovers — open any FanFiction.net story, click the CastReader icon, and the chapter starts reading immediately. No copy-pasting into a separate TTS app, no exporting, no losing your place.
FanFiction.net pages are crowded: ads, navigation menus, review counts, follow buttons, recommendation widgets. CastReader's extraction engine identifies the story text and skips the rest — you hear the fic and only the fic.
Each paragraph lights up as it's read and the page scrolls along automatically. Click any paragraph to jump straight there — replay the scene you zoned out during, or skip past a recap you remember.
Fanfic runs long — 40-chapter WIPs, slow burns that outweigh trilogies. Set the voice to 1.5–2× and a fic that would take a month of eye-reading fits into commutes, chores and gym sessions.
Deep in a chapter at your desk but need to leave? Send it to your phone with one click and keep listening in the CastReader app on the way out — no hunting for the paragraph where you stopped.
FanFiction.net hosts stories far beyond English — Spanish, French, Indonesian and dozens more. Voices automatically match the story's language with natural AI pronunciation, not robotic word-by-word spelling.
Install and listen right away — standard voices are free with no signup. CastReader Pro adds premium ultra-realistic voices, more listening hours, voice cloning and AI document analysis whenever you want the upgrade.
Add CastReader to Chrome or Edge from the Chrome Web Store — free to start, no account needed.
Browse to a story on fanfiction.net, pick the chapter you're on, and click the CastReader icon in your toolbar.
A natural AI voice reads the chapter while each paragraph highlights. Click any paragraph to jump, adjust the speed, or send the audio to your phone. When the chapter ends, open the next one and press play again.
FanFiction.net has been running since 1998 and remains one of the largest fanfiction archives on the web, with millions of stories across thousands of fandoms. In all that time the site has never offered a read-aloud or audiobook feature, and the reading experience itself has barely changed in a decade. Fans who want to listen while commuting, cooking, or resting their eyes have been left copy-pasting chapters into separate TTS apps. CastReader closes that gap in the browser: the fic stays on fanfiction.net, and the audio comes to you.
Fanfic skews long in a way published fiction rarely does. A 'medium-length' story can be 150,000 words; beloved epics pass half a million across dozens of chapters. Listening is how those numbers stop being intimidating: press play, let the highlight track the narration, nudge the speed up to 1.5×, and click back a paragraph whenever a twist deserves a second pass. When a chapter ends, the next one is a click away — open it, press play, and the marathon continues.
Listening also fixes the worst part of following works-in-progress: the gap between updates. When a fic finally posts chapter 41 after three months, you rarely remember chapter 40. Re-listening to the previous chapter while you make dinner rebuilds the context without the chore of eye re-reading — then the new chapter plays as the reward. The same trick works for comfort-fic re-reads: hearing a familiar story aloud surfaces details your skimming eyes glossed over the first three times.
Night reading is where audio earns its keep. Long fic sessions tend to happen after a full day of screens, exactly when your eyes are least willing to push through another ten thousand words. With CastReader you can dim the screen and follow by ear, or hand the session to your phone and keep listening with the lights off. Standard voices are free with no signup; CastReader Pro adds premium ultra-realistic voices and more listening hours. And your reading stays yours: CastReader reads the text on the page you're viewing to generate audio, doesn't store the story, and never touches your FanFiction.net account.
Everything you need to know about listening to fanfiction
Install CastReader from the Chrome Web Store, open any FanFiction.net story, and click the CastReader icon in your toolbar. It reads the chapter aloud with natural AI voices — each paragraph highlights as it plays, and you can click any paragraph to jump there.
No. FanFiction.net has never offered a read-aloud or audiobook feature on the site. A browser extension like CastReader is the practical way to turn fics into audio without leaving the page.
Yes. CastReader's extraction algorithm identifies the story text and ignores ads, navigation, author notes, review sections and recommendation widgets, so the narration stays inside the story.
Yes — CastReader reads the chapter you have open. When it ends, open the next chapter and press play again. Combined with paragraph highlighting, it's easy to keep your place across a 50-chapter fic.
Yes. The current paragraph is highlighted and the page auto-scrolls to follow the narration, so your eyes and ears stay in sync even in a very long chapter.
Yes. Playback speed is adjustable — many fanfic listeners settle around 1.5–2× once they're used to a voice, which turns a 10,000-word chapter into a podcast-length listen.
Use Send to Phone: start playback on desktop, click once, and the audio continues in the CastReader iOS or Android app from the same spot. Mobile browsers don't support Chrome extensions, so this hand-off is the smoothest path.
CastReader supports 40+ languages with natural AI voices, and the voice automatically matches the language of the fic — useful on FanFiction.net, where plenty of fandoms write in Spanish, French, Indonesian and beyond.
Yes. CastReader is available on both Chrome and Edge — the same extension installs from the Chrome Web Store.
Yes — long chapters and long fics are exactly the point. Free-tier listening uses standard voices; heavy daily listeners can upgrade to CastReader Pro for more listening hours and premium ultra-realistic voices.
Yes. The same extension reads Archive of Our Own and Wattpad stories aloud — handy when a fic is cross-posted or an author migrates platforms.
Yes — CastReader is free to start, no signup, with standard voices included. CastReader Pro (optional) adds premium ultra-realistic voices, more listening hours, voice cloning, and AI document analysis.
CastReader reads the text on the page you're viewing and sends it to our voice API for audio generation. We don't store the story content, and we never access your FanFiction.net account.
Download the CastReader app to listen to your uploaded documents anywhere.
Hard numbers — not vibes — from authoritative sources
$2.22 billion
US audiobook sales in 2024, up 13% year-over-year (Publishers Weekly / Audio Publishers Association)
Source →51%
of US adults have listened to an audiobook in 2025 — roughly 134 million people (APA Consumer Survey 2025)
Source →2.2 billion
people globally with near- or far-vision impairment (WHO Fact Sheet, 2024). TTS is the primary access path for digital reading content.
Source →78%
of audiobook listeners multitask while listening — commute, chores, exercise (Audiolibrix Great Audiobook Survey, 2024)
Source →27.2 minutes
average single-trip US commute in 2024, up from 26.8 (US Census ACS via Statista). That's nearly an hour each day of audio-only time.
Source →effect size 0.35
measured comprehension lift from TTS for reading-disabled students across 22 studies (Wood, Moxley, Tighe & Wagner, Journal of Learning Disabilities, 2018)
Source →15.5 million
US adults with ADHD per CDC 2024 — about half diagnosed in adulthood (CDC MMWR, October 2024)
Source →Every Chrome Web Store review below is verifiable at the link in each card. We don't hide negative feedback — we answer it within 24 hours.
“This is 1 of the best TTS and its smooth. If this is truly free i'll keep this 100%. Every other TTS says its free but has a secret. They interrupt or they just say better ai voices pay. But i like this voice. I've tried loads and this is 1 of the best ones that actually says free.”
“Works perfectly on vivaldi. One suggestion though. I wish it had a play button appear next to a paragraph when we hover over it. Just like in the case of speechify.”
“Extremely user friendly short keys. Placed forward backward and speed up down as Natural as it could be. Voices are great and smooth. I would recommend it over many hyped products.”
“At the very least it's better than many paid TTS models. Still not as good as ElevenReader or LAP, but maybe the best free model for TTS.”
“So glad I can finally switch voices! The default was fine but I found one I actually enjoy listening to for hours. Small thing, huge difference.”
“Best one i found, user friendly, and great voice over.”
“ChatGPT's long answers are finally listenable. Let it generate while I listen — doubles my productivity. Love the inline button next to each response.”
“I tried using this add-on to listen to an ebook on the O'Reilly learning platform, and it works smoothly. However, it always restarts from the first paragraph whenever I scroll or select a different paragraph. Please consider adding a bookmark or checkpoint feature so users can mark where the reading should begin.”
↪ Founder reply
Replied by CastReader founder Yan Xu within 48 hours: acknowledged the issue, shipped a bookmark feature in the following release. Reviewer's verbatim feedback drove the v1.2 roadmap.
“Need to highlight text and select it.”
“Hard to select text.”
↪ Founder reply
Replied by CastReader founder Yan Xu within 24 hours: apologized, asked which site/browser the issue occurred on, provided a workaround using the keyboard shortcut, and offered direct support at support@castreader.ai.
We re-test, re-write, and ship continuously. Every entry has a real date.
Rewrote landing pages with verbatim Chrome Web Store testimonials, real audiobook market data, and tested-12-extensions methodology. Every claim now has a sourceable link.
Telegram audio streaming now auto-turns pages reliably across Kindle Cloud Reader and Apple Books. Reduces session interruptions by ~70% in internal testing.
Wrote up the OCR pipeline: how CastReader handles Amazon's 184 random font alphabets and 361 unique glyphs per Kindle book. Shared in dev.to.
Native macOS app reads Kindle for Mac with word-level highlighting. Floating player + system-wide hotkeys. No browser needed.
Ranked #10 in Daily, 99 upvotes, 4 community comments shaped the v1.2 roadmap.
Switched from older TTS engines to Kokoro neural voices. User reviews shifted from 'usable but robotic' to 'enjoy listening for hours' (verbatim from review by patrick chiang).
OCR success rate improved from 78% to 89% on English-language Kindle books. Multi-column page detection added for academic PDFs.
I built CastReader because I owned hundreds of Kindle books and couldn't listen to them on my morning runs without buying separate Audible copies. The technical problem — Amazon's Cloud Reader font encryption — turned out to be solvable with OCR. The product problem — making it actually pleasant across phones, desktops, and 40+ languages — took two years of iteration. We're a small team. I answer every Chrome Web Store review personally (see testimonials above — including the 3-star and 1-star ones). If something's broken or missing, email support@castreader.ai.
— Yan Xu, founder
Last reviewed: · CastReader Team — reviewed against 2025 testing data
Free to start, no signup — standard voices included. Upgrade to CastReader Pro for premium ultra-realistic voices and more listening hours. Install and turn your reading list into a listening list.
★★★★★ 4.7 · Free to start · No login · Optional Pro