Apple Books read aloud: let your iPhone or Mac read to you
Apple Books has no single “read this book to me” button for every title, but your iPhone, iPad and Mac can still read almost any book aloud. Some books, mostly picture and children’s books, even come with their own narration.
This guide shows the official ways from Apple’s user guides, and how to turn your own DRM-free books and documents into audio files you can keep with the free SuperClonica engine.
On iPhone and iPad: Speak Screen
According to the iPhone User Guide, go to Settings, tap Accessibility, then Read & Speak, and turn on Speak Screen (older iOS versions call the section Spoken Content). Open the book and swipe down with two fingers from the top of the screen, or ask Siri to “Speak screen”. The controls pause the voice, change the speed and move forward or back. Accessibility Reader, in the same section, shows text in a full-screen view and can read it aloud automatically with Autoplay.
On a Mac: Read Aloud or Start Speaking
The Apple Books User Guide for Mac says that books which include the Read Aloud feature show a Read Aloud button in the toolbar at the top of the book, with a pop-up menu next to Play for page turning. For any other book, go to the page you want to hear and choose Edit, then Speech, then Start Speaking.
Audiobooks are a different thing
Audiobooks in Apple Books are recorded or produced as audio and play like any other audio. Speak Screen and Start Speaking read the text of an ebook with the system voice, so the sound depends on the voices installed on your device.
Make audio of your own books
Books bought in the Book Store are protected and stay inside Apple Books. For your own DRM-free EPUBs, manuscripts and documents, copy the text of a chapter into a text file, install the free engine with python -m pip install superclonica-cpu and run, for example, superclonica --text-file chapter1.txt --voice voice.json --lang en --output chapter1.wav. One file per chapter gives you an audiobook you can play anywhere, offline.
Pick the narrator
Hear catalog voices free on their pages with a line of 30 to 100 characters, no account needed; a calm narrator suits long books, a character voice suits children’s stories. You can also train your own voice in the studio from a 5 to 10 second recording and read bedtime stories in it. The engine speaks 31 languages; Chinese is not supported yet.