#88th of 11 in Voice
OpenReader
Reads EPUB, PDF and DOCX aloud with synced word highlighting
- Stars
- 540
- License
- MIT
- Last commit
- Oct 2026
- Last release
- Sep 2026
Overview
Next.js server that narrates EPUB, PDF, TXT, Markdown and DOCX files with synchronized read-along, generating audio ahead of playback through a self-hosted OpenAI-compatible TTS server (Kokoro-FastAPI, KittenTTS-FastAPI, Orpheus-FastAPI) or OpenAI, Replicate and DeepInfra. PDF layout is parsed with PP-DocLayoutV3 and words aligned with ONNX Whisper in a NATS JetStream worker. Exports M4B or MP3 audiobooks.
Who it is for: Self-hosters who want audiobooks from their own documents
Strengths
- Layout-aware PDF parsing and word-by-word highlighting
- Audio cache reused across seeks, reloads and audiobook export
- Storage on embedded SeaweedFS or S3; SQLite or Postgres; built-in auth
- amd64 and arm64 Docker images with automatic startup migrations
Weaknesses
- Needs a separate TTS server or cloud TTS API; nothing is bundled
- Word alignment and DOCX conversion run in a NATS JetStream compute worker you deploy
- Setup details (ports, env vars) are only in the external docs
What it needs
- no GPU
- Docker
- Needs OpenAI-compatible TTS server or cloud TTS API, NATS JetStream (compute worker), SQLite or PostgreSQL, SeaweedFS (embedded) or S3-compatible storage
- Models: Kokoro-FastAPI, KittenTTS-FastAPI, Orpheus-FastAPI, OpenAI TTS, Replicate
Also in Voice
See all 11| Rank | Project | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | VoiceboxLocal voice studio for cloning, TTS, dictation and agent speech | 72 out of 100 |
| 2 | Speech-to-SpeechModular voice-agent pipeline exposed through the OpenAI Realtime API | 67 out of 100 |
| 3 | Pocket TTS100M-parameter CPU text-to-speech with streaming and voice cloning | 64 out of 100 |
| #4 | Kokoro-FastAPIOpenAI-compatible Kokoro-82M speech API in CPU and GPU images | 64 out of 100 |
| #5 | IndexTTSZero-shot TTS with emotion, speed and pronunciation control | 61 out of 100 |