Lately, whether I chose it or not, things had to slow down.
That left me with quite a bit of time where all I could really do was watch Netflix or read. I ended up revisiting some stories I first read years ago by an author called Fel, available at Sennadar. In particular, I’ve always enjoyed the Subjugation series.
I tried reading from a screen, but honestly I found it difficult to focus for long periods. What I really needed was a way to listen to the story instead.
That led me to https://join.getpeech.com/, an Android application that converts books into audiobooks using AI-generated voices. It’s genuinely an impressive product. The voices sound natural, the interface is polished, and it offers a lot of features.
What wasn’t immediately obvious to me, however, was that the subscription is really a monthly allocation of credits. Those credits are consumed as your books are processed. For casual use this probably isn’t a problem, but I found myself purchasing additional credits surprisingly quickly. I also discovered that changing voices could mean reprocessing work that had already consumed credits.
While I liked the service, it made me wonder what self-hosted alternatives might be available.
When I had a little more energy, I started looking around.
The first option that caught my attention was Abogen, an open-source audiobook generator that uses modern text-to-speech models to convert EPUBs, PDFs, and text files into spoken audio.
Initially, I followed the Docker-based deployment instructions. In my environment I ran into several packaging and deployment issues that required some troubleshooting. After spending some time working through those problems, I switched to the native uv installation method, which proved to be much more reliable.
Once the web interface was running, the process was surprisingly straightforward:
- Upload an EPUB file.
- Select a voice and language.
- Adjust any optional settings.
- Start the conversion job.
Depending on the size of the book, the conversion process can take a while, particularly on CPU-only systems. However, Abogen supports queueing multiple jobs, making it easy to leave several books processing in the background.
The resulting audio quality was much better than I expected from a self-hosted solution. While it doesn’t completely replace professionally narrated audiobooks, it is more than good enough for listening to novels, technical documentation, or web serials.
For Android, I’ve been using https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ak.alizandro.smartaudiobookplayer, which works exceptionally well with generated audiobooks.
For Windows users, https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9p6r1m1gg9jr is another good option worth looking at.
Overall, I’m impressed with Abogen. Although the Docker deployment still feels a little rough around the edges, the native installation works well and provides a completely self-hosted alternative to subscription-based audiobook services.
If you’re reading a lot of EPUB content and don’t want to keep buying credits every month, it’s definitely worth a look.