Listen to the Books You Own

Audiobooks solved listening for the books that got one. That leaves everything else: the backlist titles, the indie and technical books, the manuscripts, the DRM-free purchases sitting in your library that no narrator will ever record. "Listen to EPUB" is really the question of making your own shelf listenable — and the answer worth having is more than a voice reading a file.

The bookmark problem, solved properly

The reason most read-aloud features feel bolted on is that they fork your place in the book. The audio has its position, the page has yours, and every switch between them starts with the ritual: where was I actually? Velo's Listen advances the same reading position its visual modes share — the typeset Reader view and the word-by-word RSVP stream. Listen through a chapter on the walk home, open the app, and the page is sitting exactly where the voice stopped. Read two pages in bed, and tomorrow's commute audio picks up from the sentence you fell asleep on — helped by a sleep timer that keeps the position honest about where the audio actually stopped.

The word tracking is what makes the hybrid style work: as the voice reads, the currently spoken word is highlighted in the text. Follow along visually and you're reading bimodally — ears carrying the pace, eyes anchoring the words — which many readers find is the mode that survives tiredness, chores, and wandering attention better than either channel alone.

On-device audio, offline everywhere

Velo's speech runs on the device, not streamed from a cloud voice server. The consequence is where it works: on a plane, underground, and offline generally — the same places your library already works, because imported books are stored locally and read with no connection. Cloud voices do sound better; that's a real trade, and if maximum narration quality is the goal, a cloud-voice product earns its keep. On-device buys you independence instead: no server between you and your book, ever.

And the honest label, stated plainly: this is text-to-speech, not a narrated audiobook. A synthetic voice reading your EPUB is not a performance of it. What you get in exchange is coverage — every book you own becomes listenable, including all the ones that will never see a recording booth.

A reader first

Listen sits inside a full reading app rather than the other way around: DRM-free EPUB and PDF import through the Share Sheet (PDFs restructured on-device so the voice reads prose, not page numbers), a real typeset page view, the RSVP focus mode, reading stats, and the on-device intelligence dashboard — with everything parsed on your hardware and nothing uploaded.

The reading experience — both visual modes, 3 imported books, the dashboard — is free to evaluate for as long as you like. Listen is part of Velo Pro ($69.99/year or $8.99/month after a 7-day trial), alongside cloud sync across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Import the book you keep meaning to get back to; between the page, the stream, and the voice, one of the three ways through it is going to fit the day you're actually having.

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