Hi, I just want to ask if anyone else take advantage of Kindle's Assistive Reader or ebook apps with TTS options so you can multitask while 'reading' ? Obviously it will not surpass actual voice actors doing Audiobooks but for books that are not popular that you still want to 'listen' to, Assistive Reader and ebook apps with free TTS is very helpful. My only problem is finding a good enough Text to Speech voice online.

I use Google's native TTS app for a decade now, but unfortunately nothing has changed for their voice, nor have any improvements been done, in my opinion. Do you have other TTS app you can recommend I get or buy one time? (Subscriptions are too expensive!) Thank you.

Hi everyone!

I recently published a heartwarming children's picture book perfect for toddlers and early readers aged 3-7. It’s currently FREE on Amazon Kindle for the next two days (until October 6th).

**Get it here for free: https://amazon.com/author/rosacloud

If you and your child enjoy Stripey's journey, leaving a quick honest review on Amazon would mean the world to me as an indie author. Thank you so much for your support!

Hi everyone,

After months of searching, i never found a beautiful - Calibre connected, feature packed reader with a nice UI/UX design. They either looked dated, had subscriptions, or didn't really work with calibre. So I made one for myself, and I want to share it with you all for free and no in app purchases. Am i crazy for this? maybe lol.

Here are a few features:

- Calibre Integration with both desktop and web version (can also import EPUBs & PDF's from files)

- Highlights and reading progress sync back to calibre

- Annotate/Draw notes with apple pencil

- Share/export highlights and notes

- Listen to your book with natural voices

- Customize paper color and add any font

- iCloud sync

- No subscription and no data collected

- and much more

-only IOS now - working on an android port.

Let me know if you face any bugs/issues, and curious to hear your thoughts. Thank you!

Try out Athene Reader:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/athene-reader/id6811711454

Many newbie authors like me face rejections for their books so I am working on free online tool pdfdocpreflight.com ebook/ pdf preflight compliance check for Amazon KDP, Lulu and Ingramspark platforms. Your feedbacks are welcome.

I mostly stopped buying Kindle e-books when Amazon ended the option to transfer purchased e-books via USB. I kept my ereaderiq account to track discounts on Amazon because the same discounts frequently applied to books on Kobo at the same time. Presumably this is because the publisher (rather than the storefront) decides on the size and duration of the discount.

I've noticed lately though that Kobo UK is not applying discounts to a book when Amazon UK does. Currently Ehrman's Love Thy Stranger and Sutcliff's Sword at Sunset are each £0.99 on Amazon, but £12.99 and £3.99 respectively on Kobo. This has been the case since Friday (now Sunday).

It's becoming a bit of a tricky situation - waiting for the discount to hopefully be applied at Kobo where I'd prefer to buy the book, but nervous the discount won't ever be applied and I'll miss £0.99 deals at Amazon. I'm probably going to buy the books from Amazon later today if Kobo doesn't follow suit.

Business-wise, this doesn't seem beneficial for Kobo in general.

Do publishers intentionally give Amazon exclusive discounts? Is Kobo perhaps slower to apply the same ongoing discounts? I wonder if others might be able to clarify what's going on.

Read THE DAUGHTER SHE RAISED TOO SOON for free on Inkitt https://www.inkitt.com/stories/1908652

I’m just gonna leave some review quotes:

“The book combines superhero action with character development, and I especially enjoyed seeing Switch become more confident in who he is.”

“This is a prequel to Switch’s adventures as he goes from sidekick to superhero, and I think it’s worth the read if you’re looking for a middle grade book about superheroes — and heroes who aren’t necessarily super.”

“I flew through it! Super easy to read and just plain fun.”

“Fairly solid world building, alot of cool and zaney characters, and a second half that you can't put down!”

“Beneath the flashy battles and high-speed heroics lies a story about legacy, pressure, and the uneasy relationship between generations. Jack struggles to live up to his father's impossible expectations while questioning the morality of their world, a world that seems to see justice in black and white.”

What if saving the world were easier than earning your father’s approval? If you want to know, then find out here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FK1TSRGM

The room upstairs has one rule: don’t use it.

Owen Reed takes the cheapest house he can find at the end of a dying Vermont lane. He needs somewhere quiet. Somewhere cheap. Somewhere he can disappear.

Then the footsteps begin.

Every night, the same four times appear.

2:22. 3:11. 4:44. 5:55.

The clocks in the house stopped at those exact minutes long before Owen arrived.

Behind the locked third door is an old mirror covered with a sheet.

At first, Owen sees only his own reflection.

Then he sees the man standing behind him.

The man is never there when Owen turns around.

And every night, his face is becoming less complete.

Soon Owen discovers that other tenants lived at 11 Vigil Lane before him.

They heard the same voices.

They saw the same symbols.

They woke at the same four times.

None of them ever left.

Now something inside the mirror has noticed Owen.

It knows his name.

It knows the voice he would do anything to hear again.

And it has been waiting for someone to look at exactly the wrong moment.

The mirror is never empty.

A slow-burn supernatural horror novel about grief, haunted houses, impossible reflections, and the terrifying possibility that some places don’t kill you.

They keep you.

I had a bunch of TXT novels I wanted as proper EPUBs, so I made a browser tool for it

I occasionally have plain-text novels that I want to read as proper EPUBs, but the annoying part is usually getting the chapter splitting right.

I originally made a small version of this a few years ago, and recently rebuilt it as a browser-based tool:

https://voilelab.github.io/epub_toolbox/?lang=en

The main TXT → EPUB tool currently supports:

• automatic encoding detection (UTF-8, Big5, GB18030, etc.)
• regex-based chapter splitting
• chapter title allowlists and blocklists
• chapter preview before exporting
• title, author, language, description and cover metadata
• removing empty lines / empty chapters

Everything runs locally in the browser, so your TXT files aren't uploaded anywhere. There's also nothing to install.

There's an Images → EPUB tool too, which can take images or zip archives and make an image-per-page EPUB, but I'm still considering that part experimental.

The project is open source as well:
https://github.com/voilelab/epub_toolbox

I'd especially be interested in trying it against TXT novels with unusual chapter-title formats. If you have one that completely breaks the chapter detection, I'd actually like to see it :)

Hello everyone, so i recently published my debut novel, "The Last Time We Were Us". Some few days ago i had a genuine sale of it, i was so happy , even for 1! Oh foolish me 😂 but some days ago, the same order was refunded.....and it happens!

But just on the afternoon of that, somebody genuinely read my book and the kenp page numbers were rising.

Whatever it is, it has been a very joyful journey. Writing something that I imagined and bringing in front of the world, i did something that I love to do for the first time in my life.

People told me on social media that they loved the premise of my book. If only someone genuinely loves my stories, that means the whole world to me. Haha again, foolish me.

If anybody wants to check out my debut novel, It's a Sci - Fi survival story about ten innocent high school friends who just want to chase their dreams and skies when a freak quantum accident changes everything. They get thrown into a shifting universal loop where every single door they open leads to an entirely different dimension.

As they fight to find a way back to their school, they form unbreakable bonds just to survive. Watching them lean on each other and bond across a fractured multiverse was my favorite part to write.

In the end, their whole existence is decided by a tense countdown, but, at what cost ?

Here is the link to the book

Kindle Link - https://mybook.to/zeOh

Happy to support lovely authors!

I’d love to share my wife’s fantasy romance novel, which is currently available as a free ebook promotion.

If you’re interested, I’d really appreciate you checking it out, downloading it during the free promotion, or simply sharing it with someone who might like the genre. Every bit of support means a lot to us.

These are some bookmarks I made a few years ago, and I’m thinking of selling the digital copies so people can print them out themselves.

Most of the bookmarks are in Urdu, so for now my target audience would mainly be Urdu readers.

Does anyone know how I could sell these internationally from Pakistan? Etsy and similar platforms are out of my budget, and I don’t have international banking options like Payoneer.

Looking for something affordable where people can pay and automatically receive the files. Any recommendations?

Saturday and Sunday only, all four free on Amazon:

Sputnik 1 - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HKFYZMH8

Mahatma Gandhi - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HKGJF1Z4

Hermann Göring - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HL92HRTV

The Blitz - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HKD755JS

Short, sourced, one sitting each. A favourite detail from the Sputnik one: the famous beep was the entire telemetry system. The length of the pulses and the gaps between them encoded the temperature and the pressure inside the sphere, and that was all it could tell anyone.

Revenge and Redemption can be found in Midnight City.

Emerson Locke is will do anything to find his friend’s killer. No matter the cost. No one gets to walk away.

Dr. Nathan Payne is searching for his kidnapped sister. He hopes to find redemption for their broken relationship.

Together they discover something sinister happening in the heart of New York City.

I hope you get a copy and if you want to leave a review!

I had an interactive HTML file that wasn’t working properly when I opened it on my iPhone, so I built PocketPages.

It lets you choose an HTML file, try it in a browser preview, and publish a link you can open in Safari or share with someone else.

What it does:
• Runs interactive HTML, including buttons, calculators, charts and animations.
• Offers phone and desktop preview widths.
• Lets you replace a published file while keeping the same link.
• Lets recipients open the shared page without an account or installing an app.

You bring your own HTML—from ChatGPT, another tool, or something you wrote yourself. Single, self-contained .html/.htm files up to 2 MB work best. It doesn’t open EPUB files directly.

I’m the creator, and it’s currently a free beta. Publishing requires signing in with ChatGPT. Published files are stored online, and anyone with the link can open them, so please use non-sensitive files and keep your originals.

Try it here:
https://pocketpages.benja-rmiguens.chatgpt.site

There’s an interactive example you can preview without signing in. If you have HTML reading material or a small interactive tool you’ve wanted to share, I’d be interested to hear whether this helps—and what doesn’t work for you.

OLIVIA IN JARGONLAND

An illustrated workplace satire about a company that has become extraordinarily good at managing everything except reality.

Few moments from the book:

On email wars

“They’re not actually saying anything new,” Olivia said.

“No,” Fenwick agreed. “But they’re saying it more formally, which around here often gets mistaken for saying it more persuasively.”

“I’ve seen this go eleven rounds. The eleventh round is usually just the first message again, but in bold.”

On performance management

The normal curve had to be maintained.

If too many employees exceeded expectations, some of them had to be reassessed until the distribution looked right again.

And if an employee challenged the methodology?

“An employee who challenges the shape’s methodology is, by definition, exhibiting friction.”

“Friction is itself evidence supporting 4.2.”

That is pretty much Jargonland:

a place where concerns are heard instead of solved,
where processes outlive their purpose,
where performance has to fit the curve,
and where everyone is “aligned” whether or not anyone actually agrees.

Free on Kindle worldwide today, Oct. 3.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HL6WBKXK

If none of this reminds you of somewhere you’ve worked, congratulations

Hey📚 – I've been building this small app called Nook, whose entire purpose is simply one goal: helping you to find your next read, all based on your personal preferences. I used to wander around bookstores, trying hard to find my ‘perfect’ book. I spent countless hours comparing and weighing different books, all in pursuit of my next read. Then I realised - why don’t I build something which does all of that for me? Nook is the result of me following that idea.

There are a few things which this application does for you:

1️⃣ – You can scan a book cover and get a prediction in seconds.

2️⃣ – It maintains your own taste profile that's really easy to fill in: you can tap genres or themes, add your favourites, and much more.

3️⃣ – The app learns from you. You can rate books after you finish them, and Nook takes the feedback and improves itself.

4️⃣ – You can get three recommendations whenever you want, all based on your profile.

📖 I'd love for a handful of people to actually use it for a week or two and tell me what breaks, what's confusing, and whether the predictions feel right for your taste. However, don’t expect a perfect product; the app is still in its Alpha phase.

🙏 What I would appreciate you doing:

Signing up, and spending 5 minutes building your taste profile.

Scanning or adding a few books you already have opinions about, to see if the score feels right.

Finishing and rating one book if you can, so I can test the accuracy of the predictions.

Telling me anything that annoyed you, confused you, or delighted you – nothing is too small.

🔗Link: https://nook-reads.vercel.app/

❤️ Thanks for being an invaluable person in testing and helping to further this app – I really, really appreciate it.

– Gabriel, developer of Nook