EPUB to audiobook: convert an e-book to MP3
An e-book you would rather hear than read: on a walk, at the wheel, with tired eyes. An EPUB already holds clean text split into chapters, which makes it the easiest format to turn into an audiobook: get the text out, then voice it chapter by chapter.
The free SuperClonica engine does the voicing offline on your computer, with natural neural voices and no length limit. This guide shows how to extract the text, how to voice it to MP3 and which books you may convert.
What you need
Most books bought in big stores, including Kindle books, are locked with DRM. They cannot be converted, and this guide does not cover breaking DRM, which is prohibited in many countries.
- A DRM-free EPUB: your own manuscript, a public-domain book or a book sold without DRM.
- The free calibre e-book manager to extract the text.
- The free SuperClonica engine and Python 3.10 or newer: python -m pip install superclonica-cpu.
- No graphics card: an ordinary processor is enough.
Hear a page free online
Before converting a whole book, copy a sentence from it and paste it on the page of any voice, 30 to 100 characters, choose the language and press Voice it. In a few seconds you hear how the narrator will sound, with no account.
Get the text out of the EPUB
One file per chapter is easier to check, to fix and to skip through in a player.
- Convert the book to plain text with calibre: ebook-convert book.epub book.txt.
- Delete the table of contents, the copyright page and footnote markers.
- Split the text at chapter headings into one file per chapter.
- Write unusual names and abbreviations the way they should be read.
Voice the chapters to MP3
Voice each chapter with one command: superclonica --text-file chapter01.txt --voice F2 --lang en --normalize --output chapter01.mp3. Long chapters are split at natural pauses and joined into one file, and every chapter starts from the same timbre. By our estimate an hour of audio takes 6 to 10 minutes on a desktop 8-core processor. For a single M4B file with chapter marks, join the chapters with an audio tool such as ffmpeg.
Which books you may convert
Listening to your own DRM-free books in private is up to you. Books in the public domain, for example from Project Gutenberg, can be voiced and shared, but the public-domain status of a book differs between countries. Publishing an audiobook of a book still under copyright needs the rights holder’s permission; check also the store’s rules about AI narration.