How to use EbookVoice
EbookVoice turns books you own into audiobooks. You give it a book file, choose a voice, and it reads the whole book aloud for you. The audio is yours to listen to any time, even with the screen locked.
This guide walks through everything in the order you will meet it. If anything here is unclear or wrong, email youmbidev@gmail.com and it will be fixed.
1. Try the sample book first
When you open the app, there is already one book in your library: a sample audiobook that everyone gets. You do not need an account to play it.
- Open the app.
- In the Library, find the book marked Sample.
- Tap it, then press play.
That is the whole product in one minute: this is what your own books will sound like.
2. Get a book into the app
There are two ways to add a book.
Option A: Find a free classic in the app
- Go to the Discover tab.
- Search by title or author, or browse the categories. The catalog holds around 75,000 classic public-domain books, such as Pride and Prejudice, Sherlock Holmes, and The Art of War.
- Tap a book, then tap Convert.
Note: the in-app catalog only carries classics whose copyright has expired. Modern bestsellers cannot be included, but you can convert your own copy — see Option B.
Option B: Upload a book you own
- Go to your Library and tap the upload button.
- Pick a file from your device. Three formats work:
- EPUB (.epub) — the standard ebook format.
- Word (.docx) — common for BookShare titles and manuscripts.
- DAISY (.zip) — the accessible book format used by BookShare and similar libraries. Use the text edition, not the audio edition.
- The app reads the file and shows you the chapters it found.
Please only convert books you own or otherwise have the right to use.
3. Choose a language and voice
After the chapters load, the app asks two things:
- Language. The app detects the book's language and pre-selects it. 27 languages are supported. If the detection is wrong, pick the right one from the list.
- Voice. You can preview any voice with a short sample before choosing. There are over 200 voices. Voices marked Multilingual can switch language mid-book — useful for books that mix languages, for example an English novel with full French sentences in it.
4. Convert
Press convert and the book is read aloud on our server, chapter by chapter. A short book takes a few minutes; a long novel can take half an hour or more. You can leave the app entirely — the conversion keeps running, and the book appears in your library when it is ready.
5. Listen
- Play anywhere. Audio keeps playing with the app in the background or the phone locked.
- Lock-screen controls. Play, pause, and skip work from the lock screen, from headphones and from your car.
- Resume. The app remembers where you stopped and picks up from there next time.
- Speed. Playback speed is adjustable in the player.
- Follow along. The player can show the book's text and highlight each word as it is spoken. On a braille display, the same panel lets you read along by paragraph.
- Offline. On the phone you can download a finished book for listening without internet.
6. Accounts and the free trial
You can convert your first book without creating an account. If you then sign up, that book moves into your new account automatically, and nothing is lost.
With a free account you get a few conversion credits to start, and a new credit arrives every month. One credit converts one book, no matter its length (up to the size limit). Your converted books stay in your library — finished audio is never taken away.
7. Subscriptions — what they are actually for
Listening is free for everyone: playback, lock-screen controls, follow-along highlighting, every voice and every language. None of that is ever behind a paywall.
The one thing that costs credits is converting new books, because every conversion runs on a server that costs real money to keep on. Subscriptions exist to keep the lights on: paid plans add more monthly conversion credits and raise the per-book size limit, and in return they fund the server that does the converting — which is also what will pay for bigger books, faster conversions and better voices for everybody. Plans and prices are shown inside the app under Profile.
8. Accessibility
The app is built to work with VoiceOver end to end: every screen, button and control is labelled, conversion progress is announced, and the follow-along panel reads by paragraph on braille displays. Accessibility problems are treated as bugs, not feature requests — if VoiceOver reads something wrongly, in the wrong order, or not at all, please email and it will be fixed.
9. When something goes wrong
- A conversion failed. Usually a corrupted file or a temporary server issue. Try converting again — a failed conversion does not use up your credit (credits only count when a conversion completes).
- "This book is too long." There is a per-book word limit that depends on your plan. Splitting the book into parts and converting each part works.
- A DAISY zip is rejected as audio-only. Download the text or full-text DAISY edition instead — an audio-only DAISY book has no text for us to read from.
- The word highlighting drifts on some voices. A few voices do not report word timing precisely; the audio itself is unaffected. Choosing a different voice (Multilingual ones are the most precise) fixes it.
- Anything else. Email youmbidev@gmail.com with the book title and what happened. Replies usually come within two business days.