Autiobooks: Automatically convert epubs to audiobooks

Autiobooks generates .m4b audiobooks from regular .epub e-books, using Kokoro's high-quality speech synthesis.

Kokoro is an open-weight text-to-speech model with 82 million parameters. It yields natural sounding output while being able to run on consumer hardware.

It supports American, British English, French, Korean, Japanese and Mandarin (though we only-support English, for now) and a wide range of different voices with different accents and prosody.

PRs are welcome!

Changelog

1.1.0

• Fix race condition - @Thabian

1.0.9

• Fix issue with output file containing multiple audio stream 10 - @tomhense
• Add an entrypoint for pipx - @tomhense

1.0.7

• Uptick kokoro package

1.0.6

• Fix chapter index - @tomhense

1.0.5

• Fix pip installs

1.0.3

• Fix bug causing errors on some linux installs
• Read epub files with chapters not marked as ITEM_DOCUMENT
• Select all chapters if none are selected

1.0.2

• Window can be resized

1.0.1

• Initial release

How to install and run

(Note that pip installs are currently not working - we are looking into the cause of this, but in the meantime, please download the repo and run directly)

If you have Python 3 on your computer, you can install it with pip. Be aware that it won't work with Python 3.13.

pip install autiobooks

You will require ffmpeg and tkinter installed:

Linux:

sudo apt install ffmpeg python3-tkinter

MacOS:

brew install ffmpeg python-tk

Also recommended is espeak-ng for better processing of unknown words.

To start the program, run:

python3 -m autiobooks

The program creates .wav files for each chapter, then combines them into a .m4b file for playing using an audiobook player.

Author

by David Nesbitt, distributed under MIT license.