You already own the books. What you want is to hear them on the commute and pick up the page again at night. That does not require converting anything into a file — it requires a reader that speaks.
Two different things get called "ebook to audiobook". One is producing an audio file — an MP3 you can keep. The other is listening to a book you already own, right where it lives. CastReader does the second and not the first: it reads the text aloud in the app or the browser, highlights the line as it goes, and remembers where you stopped — there is no export and no file to download. DRM-free EPUB files can be opened directly in the CastReader app for iPhone, iPad and Android. Books locked inside a store's own app or reader are reached through that platform's route instead, not by converting the file, because the file is encrypted and unlocking it is neither possible nor legal. And a synthetic voice reading your ebook is not the same product as a produced audiobook with a hired narrator — it is faster to get, costs nothing extra, and covers the many books that were never recorded at all.
The right route depends on where the book lives, not on what format it is.
Open it directly in the CastReader app for iPhone, iPad or Android and press play. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is converted — the file stays where it is.
Get the appKindle files are DRM-protected, so conversion is off the table. The route runs through Kindle's own reader instead — that has its own page with the setup steps.
Listen to KindleSerialised fiction, documentation, a long article — anything that renders as a web page can be read aloud in Chrome or Edge with the paragraph highlighted.
Read a page aloudThen this is not the tool. CastReader plays; it does not export audio files. Say so plainly rather than waste your time — a converter is what you are looking for.
What we do insteadThe differences from a produced audiobook are real, and some of them are in your favour
Most books have no audiobook. Technical manuals, out-of-print titles, self-published work, translated web fiction, the PDF a colleague sent you. For those the choice is not "synthetic voice or narrator" — it is "synthetic voice or nothing".
The line being spoken is highlighted and the page follows it. Look up at a traffic light, look back, and you have not lost your place. A produced audiobook and an ebook are two separate positions to keep track of; here there is one.
Fiction with distinct voices, poetry, anything where performance is the point — a hired narrator does something no synthetic voice matches. When an audiobook edition exists and you want the performance, buy the audiobook. This is for everything else.
CastReader reads books you already have open. It does not strip DRM, unlock store libraries, or download anything on your behalf — those are not features that were left out, they are lines that are not crossed.
A loose EPUB or PDF goes into the app. A store library goes through that store's route. A web page goes through the browser extension. The table above maps them.
No import queue, no conversion wait, no processing bar. Playback starts on the passage in front of you.
Pick a voice and a pace that you can listen to for an hour, then leave them. Speeds above 1.25× are a CastReader Pro feature.
People typing that phrase are rarely asking for a file. Pressed on it, what most of them want is to keep going with a book while their hands and eyes are busy — the same book, the same place in it, just delivered through the ears for the next forty minutes. Conversion is the mental model they arrived with, borrowed from image and video tools, not the outcome they actually need.
That distinction matters because conversion is the hard, brittle path. It takes time before you hear anything, produces a file you then have to manage, breaks on any book with DRM, and loses your reading position the moment the two copies drift apart. Reading aloud in place skips all of it: press play, and the position you keep is the one you already had.
The DRM point deserves stating without euphemism. Books bought from a major store are encrypted and tied to that store's reader. No legitimate tool converts those into audio files, and any tool claiming to is asking you to break the lock. The workable route is to open the book in the reader it belongs to and have that page read aloud — which is why the platform-specific pages exist rather than one universal converter.
It is also worth being honest about the ceiling. A synthetic voice is not a performance. For a novel that lives on its narration — a comic memoir, poetry, anything with dialogue that needs acting — a produced audiobook is a better object, and when one exists it is usually worth the money. The case for reading your own library aloud is strongest exactly where publishers never went: the technical book, the paper, the manual, the translated serial, the eleven PDFs you accumulated this month. Those were never going to be recorded by anyone.
One more practical thing. Listening speed is a bigger factor than voice quality for most people once the novelty wears off. A voice you found slightly flat at 1× often becomes perfectly serviceable at 1.5×, because at that pace you are tracking meaning rather than admiring delivery. Choose the pace first, then the voice.
The things worth knowing before installing
You can listen to it, which is what most people mean. CastReader reads the book aloud where it already is, with the current line highlighted. What it does not do is produce an audio file you can keep — there is no export and no MP3.
It reads EPUB aloud rather than converting it. A DRM-free EPUB can be opened directly in the CastReader app for iPhone, iPad and Android, and playback starts immediately with no processing step.
Not by converting the file — Kindle books are DRM-protected. The working route goes through Kindle's own reader, which has its own setup steps on the Listen to Kindle page.
No, and it is better to say so. A produced audiobook has a hired narrator performing the text. This is a clear synthetic voice reading it. For books that were never recorded — which is most books — that is the difference between listening and not listening.
Free to start, with no account needed to try it. Playback speeds above 1.25× and premium voices are CastReader Pro features.
Speech is generated as you listen, so a connection is needed for the online voices. Your device's own built-in voices work without one.
Yes. Progress is kept per book, so returning after a few days puts you back at the paragraph you left rather than at the beginning.
Voices are available across many languages, and the reading voice follows the language of the text. Quality varies by language — try the voice on a paragraph before committing to a long book.
The DRM-safe route for books in your Kindle library
Kobo's library, read aloud
Apple Books titles, read aloud
Papers and manuals, read in the right column order
Fanfiction that will never have an audiobook edition
Local EPUB import and offline reading on mobile
Download the CastReader app for DRM-free EPUB import and supported mobile reading workflows.
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.com.
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.
CastReader provides native apps for iPhone and Android; Android downloads are available directly from Google Play.
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.
The phone app flow now has its own landing page for bookshelf sync, Read Aloud, synced highlighting, auto-scroll, background playback, and resume progress.
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 9 supported 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.com.
— Yan Xu, founder
Last reviewed: · CastReader Team — reviewed against 2025 testing data
Open something you own, press play, and see whether an hour of it holds up. Free to start, no account.
For local PDF, DOCX, TXT, Markdown, and images, plus supported webpages and browser-based readers. Local EPUB import is not available.
For DRM-free EPUBs and mobile reading on iPhone, iPad, and Android.
Official App Store and Google Play downloads · Chrome, Edge, and Firefox extensions