An EPUB reader that reads your books aloud, offline

1. Get the file into the app. Either open Sandbook and use the Files picker, or find the .epub in Files, Mail or Safari and choose Open with Sandbook or share it to Sandbook. The book is copied into the app's own storage, so it keeps working after you move or delete the original. Import a file with a name you already have and you get Book (2).epub rather than a silent overwrite.
2. Open it from the shelf. Your library shows the real cover art from the EPUB, the title and author, how far you are and the time left; Details adds the word count. The book opens at the paragraph where you stopped.
3. Press play. The first sentence starts speaking within a moment; the rest generates ahead of playback while you listen.
4. Steer while it reads. Tap any paragraph to jump there. Skip a paragraph back or forward, move a chapter at a time, or open the chapter list and go anywhere in the book.

That is the whole flow. EPUB to speech takes four taps — there is no conversion step, no upload, and no waiting for a file to render.

Not on your iPhone right now? Try it in your browser: open an EPUB online and hear a chapter read aloud, free, with nothing to install.

The paragraph currently being read gets a soft tint, the word being spoken is marked inside it, and the page scrolls to keep it in view, so you can follow the text with your eyes, glance away, and find your place again instantly. Scroll away on purpose and a “Back to current” button brings you back. It is the mode that makes a dense book survivable: listening carries you forward, the highlight keeps you anchored.

You can also just read normally and use the voice when your eyes get tired. Reading Options gives you light, sepia and dark themes (or follow the system), System, Serif, Rounded, Mono and Legible fonts, text size and line spacing on top of your system text size, and an immersive mode that hides the controls.

Chapters come from the EPUB spine. HTML is stripped down to clean paragraphs, chapter titles are pulled from the document's own headings, and empty chapters are skipped so you don't sit through three seconds of silence between sections.

Finish a chapter and Sandbook continues into the next one without being asked, so a book plays continuously rather than stopping every twenty minutes. Close the app mid-paragraph and your position is saved for that specific file — reopen it a week later, from the shelf, and you resume where you were. Every book in the library keeps its own place independently.

Because everything is stored on the device, this survives airplane mode and a dead cell signal. It does not survive moving to a different iPhone: there is no account and no sync, so your place lives on the device that read it.

Most people who want books read aloud already own the books. They sit in a folder as DRM-free EPUBs: classics from Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks, a Humble Bundle haul, a manuscript you exported yourself. Sandbook turns that folder into a listening shelf. Each book plays like an audiobook, moves into the next chapter on its own and opens at the paragraph where you stopped, with its own voice and speed.

There is no narrator to wait for and no price per title: the 41 voices are generated on your iPhone, so any book you can import can be heard tonight, and everything stays on your device. What you don't get is an audio file to keep. Sandbook is a reader, not a converter.

Works: any DRM-free .epub file — books from Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg, Humble Bundle, itch.io, most indie publishers, anything you exported yourself, plus PDFs and plain .txt, Word (.docx), RTF, Markdown and HTML files, and web pages.

Doesn't work: DRM-protected books from a store's own reader, and MOBI and AZW3 files. If you have a format that isn't supported, convert it to EPUB first.

Voices come in six languages: 28 American and British English voices, plus Spanish, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Hindi. A Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese or Hindi book opens with a voice in its language; you can change it, and the book remembers your choice. The app needs iOS 18.2 on an iPhone 12 or later, or an iPad with an A14 or M1 chip or later.

And it is a reader, not an audiobook exporter. Sandbook reads an EPUB aloud while the book is open in front of you; it does not turn a whole book into an audiobook file you can keep or play elsewhere. M4A export exists, but not for the whole book: on a Mac one chapter at a time, on iPhone and iPad only in Write text for text you typed or pasted there. If what you want is a whole book rendered to audio, this is the wrong app and the FAQ below says so too.

A voice that sounds pleasant for thirty seconds can grate over nine hours, so audition before you commit. The voice picker synthesizes a sample line on the spot with the real model, so what you hear is what the book will sound like, and a heart keeps the ones you like in Favorites. Each book remembers its own voice and speed. Before you install, you can paste a page of your book into the in-browser version of the same voices and listen.

Fiction tends to sit well with the warmer, more expressive voices; a technical book is easier to follow in something steady and even. Speed runs 0.5× to 2.5× and is applied inside the model by stretching or compressing predicted phoneme durations, so 1.8× sounds like someone reading briskly rather than a tape played fast.