Turn any ebook into an audiobook on your iPhone

The short version: LightReadr is a free iPhone app that reads your ebooks aloud in a natural-sounding voice, highlighting each word as it goes. It comes with five classics, so you can hear it working before you import anything.

How to do it

1. Install LightReadr from the App Store. It’s free, with no account to create.
2. Open one of the five included classics, or tap + in your library and choose an ebook from Files.
3. Tap Read Aloud. Narration starts from wherever you are on the page.

That’s it. To start somewhere else, tap any sentence and the voice picks up right there. Lock your phone and it keeps reading.

Where to get free ebooks on your iPhone

Hundreds of thousands of books are free to download, legally, because they’re out of copyright:

• Project Gutenberg — 70,000+ free books, from Austen to Zola.
• Standard Ebooks — classics, carefully typeset and proofread.
• Internet Archive — a vast library, with free downloads of public-domain titles.

Open any of them in Safari on your iPhone and tap a book’s download link. On Project Gutenberg, choose the first download option, marked EPUB3. The book saves to the Downloads folder in the Files app, and from there it’s one tap to bring it into LightReadr.

Why not use an online converter?

Most ebook-to-audiobook converters ask you to upload your book to a website, wait, then download a pile of audio files and find something to play them in. You lose the text, and you have to keep track of where you are yourself.

LightReadr skips all of that:

• Nothing leaves your phone. The voice is generated on your iPhone, not on a server. Your books are never uploaded.
• The text stays with the audio. Every word highlights as it’s spoken, so you can read and listen at the same time, or look up and find your place instantly.
• Your place is kept. Switch between reading and listening mid-page, and pick up where you left off.
• Speed is yours. Slow it down to 0.5× or speed it up to 2×.

What it sounds like

Not like the robotic text-to-speech you’re used to. LightReadr uses a neural voice model that runs on your phone, with natural pacing and intonation, and several voices to choose from. Hear a 16-second recording from an iPhone 17 Pro.

What works, and what doesn’t

• Works: free ebooks from the libraries above, and other unlocked ebooks you’ve downloaded.
• Doesn’t work: books bought in the Kindle or Apple Books stores. They’re locked to those apps.
• Not yet: PDFs.

Is it really free?

Yes. No subscription, no ads, no account, and no limit on how much it reads to you.

Download on the App Store