I’ve talked about ElevenReader a few times on here, the app that can turn an ebook into an audio book so you can listen while you read, an idea often referred to as “immersive reading”. It’s a great app, but it seems to have a hard to keeping track of where my reading progress is, particularly if I jump to a different device.
I’ve been looking more to see what’s out there, and there were generally three options:
- ElevenReader, which is pretty solid.
- Speechify, which is very popular (and fairly good), but also does a poor job of tracking my position and also is soft on options such as font selections.
- All of the others, most of which relay on the text-to-speech services on your local device, which generally isn’t very good and sounds rather robotic.
I had given up hope until I recently found Paper2Audio and wow, it’s great! The name made me think of like a vibe-coded app or something (there are a LOT of those), so I almost passed it by, but this thing is legit. It has a solid web interface, and the mobile apps (for both platforms) work great. The progress syncing between its various apps is stunningly good; it does word-level syncing in a matter of seconds.
The audio
They handle the audio a bit differently than the others, but the result is that they have the best free plan of any of these apps. With ElevenReader and Speechify, you can change voices whenever you’re reading and it’ll buffer for a few seconds and continue. With Paper2Audio, you choose the voice (you can preview each of them before you start) up front and it takes 5-10 minutes to process the entire book and then you’re essentially locked into that voice for the book.
The quality of the audio is quite good; not quite as good as ElevenReader (but better than Speechify, I think). They have a smaller selection of voices (maybe 10ish), but they’re all pretty solid.
The cost
Their free plan allows you to generate up to 56 hours of audio per week, which seems way too generous and almost no one will go over that. However, I did run into another snag when trying to load the book “The Brothers Karamozov” in there and hit a limit of 250,000 words per document (which that book amazingly goes over). The app offered tips on splitting the book to avoid the limit, which I thought was a very nice touch, but I chose to pay ($20/mo) simply to support a solid app. Most users should never need to pay, though.
Also, like most of these apps (but not all of them, as I’ve found), you can highlight and take notes to review later, and those sync instantly as well.
The compatibility
Lastly, while it works on Android and iOS devices, it also works on Boox tablets like mine (which ElevenReader and Speechify do not). The performance is surprisingly good, though not quite as solid as an iPad, as you’d expect.
Anyhow, if you have any interest in taking your epub books into immersive reading, my initial thoughts on this product are quite good. Check it out at Paper2Audio.com.
Note: I have zero affiliation with them. There’s no paid link or anything, I’m just super impressed and I hope they stick around for a long time!
I’ve also struggled with ElevenReader’s progress tracking, especially when switching devices. How does Paper2Audio handle this, and have you noticed any improvements in keeping track of your reading progress with the new app?
It certainly handles reading progress better than others, so you should probably give it a try!
I’m using TimeToRead.co (a simply app I made) to track my reading progress, so that way I can use any variety of reading apps (or paper works or whatever) and just track everything in there.