Audionarrator · for the books on your shelf
PDF to audiobook — done right.
Listen to the books you already own.
Drop in a PDF, DOCX, or EPUB. Audionarrator finds the chapters, hides the table of contents and front matter, and gives you back a real audiobook.
- Chapter detection that knows body, front matter, and index
- Every voice on every plan
- Resume across phone, laptop, and the train
No credit card. 5,000 words to try it.
Why this exists
Built for the books no one is going to record for you.
Speechify and ElevenLabs Reader narrate articles. NotebookLM summarises them. Audible recorded the books publishers signed deals for. Most of what's on your shelf isn't any of those — it's the textbook your professor assigned, the white paper you keep meaning to read, the technical book you bought on a flight.
Audionarrator is for the rest of your library. Drop the PDF. Get chapter detection that actually understands what a front matter is. Listen on a walk, on a train, while you fold laundry. The book is yours; the time is, finally, too.
Inside
Built like a reading app. Not a TTS pipe with a pretty wrapper.
A library you'd want to use. A chapter list that hides what you don't want to hear. A player that knows where you left off. These are real product screens, not marketing illustrations.
Your library
6 books · 4 in progress
Molecular Biology of the Cell
Chapter 4 of 24
Designing Data-Intensive Applications
Chapter 7 of 12
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Ready to start
The Pragmatic Programmer
Finished
Atomic Habits
Chapter 3 of 20
Sapiens
Ready to start
Book · 24 chapters
Molecular Biology of the Cell
18 in playback · 6 hidden as front matter
Chapters
How it works
Three steps. About a minute.
Drop your PDF.
Drag onto the library or browse to upload. Anything up to 50 MB. Textbooks, papers, dense technical reads — anything with selectable text.
Detection runs.
Audionarrator parses the document structure to find chapters, then classifies each one — body, front matter, back matter — so the table of contents doesn't get narrated.
Listen anywhere.
Open the chapter list, hit play. Resume across devices. Switch chapters freely. Skip what you don't want. It's an audiobook you actually control.
Use it for
The reads that don't get recorded.
Textbooks
Cell biology, organic chemistry, real analysis. The textbook your professor assigned that you've never actually finished.
Research papers
The 40-page PDF you keep telling yourself you'll read this weekend. Drop it in, hear it on the walk to lab.
Technical books
DDIA, Compilers, The Mythical Man-Month. The shelf you've carefully curated but haven't actually read past chapter three.
Plans
Start free. Pay only if it sticks.
Free
5,000 words on signup
Creator
50,000 words · Q&A · downloads
Pro
200,000 words · 3 concurrent · priority
Studio
600,000 words · unlimited library
Worth knowing
Questions you're probably having.
- Will Audionarrator work with my textbook PDF?
- Almost always — if the PDF has a text layer (which most modern textbooks, papers, and technical books do). Audionarrator reads the document structure to find chapters, classifies front matter so you're not narrated the table of contents, and produces a real audiobook with chapter-aware navigation.
- What about scanned books or screenshots?
- Today we detect when a PDF is scanned (image-only, no text layer) and tell you up front — OCR isn't live yet. Screenshot upload and OCR for scans are next on the roadmap. If your book is old or a photocopy, sit tight; if you have the publisher PDF, you're good now.
- How does Audionarrator handle equations, figures, and code blocks?
- Narration carries the prose, and the pages that hold figures, code, and equations aren't lost — Audionarrator detects them and surfaces them as source pages alongside the chapter, so you can open the original page image while you listen. The pages are filterable by figure, code, or equation. Only tables are skipped today.
- How is Audionarrator different from Speechify, Audible, and NotebookLM?
- Audible recorded the books publishers signed deals for. Speechify narrates articles and pages of text as one long stream. NotebookLM gives you a podcast about a document, not the document itself. Audionarrator is for the books on your shelf that aren't any of those — textbooks, research papers, technical reads — turned into a real chapter-aware audiobook you actually own.More on how Audionarrator compares to Speechify
- Is it legal to make audiobooks of books I own?
- Your file, your use. Audionarrator processes the PDFs you upload privately for you; we never redistribute, share, or sell access to your books. This is the same legal ground as using a screen reader on a PDF you bought. If you're uploading something you don't have rights to, that's on you — Audionarrator isn't a piracy tool.
- What happens to my files after I upload them?
- Source PDFs and generated audio live encrypted in private storage, accessible only to your account. Nothing's used for training. Delete a book and the file is removed from storage as well as from your library. Delete your account and everything goes with it.
From the maker
I built Audionarrator because I had a 600-page systems textbook for a class with no audiobook. I tried Speechify on the PDF — it read every footnote, every page header, every figure caption like running prose. NotebookLM gave me a podcast about the book. I wanted to listen to the book itself.
So I built something that knows what a chapter is, what front matter is, and what you don't want to hear. It's early — there's a lot still being added. But if you've been meaning to read a book and would rather listen, give it a try.
Micheal
Founder · Audionarrator
One book. Free.
No subscription, no credit card. Upload your first book and see if it sticks.