Breaking

Audiblez turns EPUB books into local audiobooks with Kokoro TTS

July 5, 2026 at 18:56 EDT

Media Generation
Open Source
Foundation Models

Audiblez, an open-source tool that converts EPUB e-books into audiobooks (.m4b format) using Kokoro-82M speech synthesis, is drawing attention. Built by developer Claudio Santini (santinic), its GitHub repository has gathered roughly 7.9k stars. It can generate high-quality, chapter-structured audio files locally from an EPUB with a single command.

Jan 27, 2025 · Open-Source TTS

Audiblez turns your EPUBs into audiobooks — entirely on your own machine

A free, open-source tool that extracts chapters from an e-book and generates a navigable M4B audiobook locally using Kokoro-82M — no cloud, no subscription, no data leaving your computer.

82M

parameters in the Kokoro TTS model — trained on <100 hrs of data

voices across 9 languages

M4B

chaptered output, ready to play

Same book, wildly different speed

Converting Animal Farm (~160k characters) — GPU vs CPU throughput

~600

chars/sec

Colab T4 GPU

~5 minutes

~60

chars/sec

M2 MacBook (CPU)

~1 hour

GPU acceleration (CUDA) runs roughly 10× faster — CPU works, but long books can take over an hour.

How it works

EPUB

extract text & chapters

→

Kokoro-82M

synthesize WAV audio

→

ffmpeg

merge to chaptered M4B

Strengths

Fast on GPU, private local execution
GUI usable by non-technical people
Playback 0.5×–2.0×, per-chapter selection
No cloud, no subscription, no copyright lock-in

Limitations

CPU can take 1 hr+ on long books
Windows needs venv-based setup
No Apple Silicon support, no voice cloning
Chinese voice prosody still rough

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