← Blog 27 August 2026 · Aloud

How to turn an EPUB into an audiobook on your iPhone

You own the book. There is no audiobook edition, or there is one and it costs more than the book did. Here is how to listen to it anyway, without a desktop conversion tool and without uploading your library to anyone.

The options, honestly

Apple Books “Read Aloud”

Built in and free. Open a book, tap the menu, choose Read Aloud. It works, and for a chapter at a time it is fine. It is also clearly built for reading a page rather than listening to a book: the voice is the older system voice, and it is not designed for the way people actually use audiobooks — in the car, on a walk, half asleep.

Speak Screen

An accessibility feature that reads whatever is on screen. Turn it on in Settings under Accessibility, then Spoken Content. It will read anything, which is genuinely useful, but it has no concept of a book: no chapters, no position memory, no sleep timer.

Desktop conversion

Convert the EPUB to audio on a computer with a text-to-speech tool, then move the files back to the phone. This produces a real file you can keep, and it is a lot of steps, a lot of disk space, and a fresh round of them every time you want another book.

An app that narrates on the phone

Import the EPUB, get a chaptered audiobook with a lifelike voice, generated on the device. No conversion step, no upload, and the position is remembered because the app knows it is holding a book. This is what Aloud does.

Doing it with Aloud, step by step

• 1. Get the EPUB onto your phone. Share it from Files, Mail, or wherever you keep it.
• 2. Open it in Aloud. The book is split into its real chapters, not into arbitrary chunks.
• 3. Pick a voice and press play. Narration is generated on the iPhone as you listen, so it starts almost immediately instead of processing the whole book first.
• 4. Listen anywhere. Lock screen controls, speed, sleep timer, and your place kept per book.

The catch worth knowing about

It has to be a DRM-free EPUB. If a store locked the file, no app can open it without breaking the lock, and breaking it is not something Aloud does. In practice that means books you bought from DRM-free sellers, files you made yourself, and the enormous free catalogue below.

You may not need your own file at all

Aloud has more than 125,000 free books built in, from Project Gutenberg, LibriVox and Open Library — every out-of-copyright classic, with a human recording where a LibriVox volunteer has made one. Where those come from.

Common questions