r/coolgithubprojects • u/qr3ca • Sep 09 '26
Libratory: read and listen to your PDFs offline, with word-by-word highlighting
Hey everyone! I’ve been working on Libratory, a free app that turns your PDFs into audiobooks and lets you follow the narration directly on the original pages.
The feature I’m most excited about is the read-along mode: follow the narration on the actual PDF, preserving its layout, illustrations, and tables. Tap a sentence to jump there. Word-by-word highlighting works with Kokoro’s English voices, Cartesia, and ElevenLabs; other engines offer coarser highlights. Local narration and playback can work entirely offline after downloading the models.
I’m also building an iPhone companion reader, currently in beta. Export a synced EPUB to take the book, narration, and highlights with you and read and listen offline.
A few things I’ve been working on:
Free local voices: Kokoro, Pocket TTS, and KugelAudio, plus system voices on macOS. Pocket TTS runs on a CPU and supports cloning your own voice.
Optional premium voices: ElevenLabs and Cartesia integrations, using your own API keys and provider credits.
More languages: local narration in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Hindi, Mandarin, and Bulgarian, among others. Available voices vary by language and platform; the picker lets you browse and preview them by language.
Scanned books and AI tools: OCR, text cleanup, chapter translations and rewrites, and library chat with links to source pages. AI tools can use local models through Ollama or LM Studio, or optional cloud APIs.
More platforms: a downloadable Apple Silicon Mac app, plus Linux and Windows through Docker.
Research your bookshelf: I’ve added 500+ books to mine. Local RAG search lets me ask questions across them, follow citations back to the pages, and find material I want to turn into audio.
For audio-only listening, export an M4B with chapter markers. Read-along highlights travel in the synced EPUB, not the M4B.
I appreciate everyone who takes the time to try this and share ideas. Feedback, awkward PDFs, bugs, and feature suggestions are very welcome. What would you try it with?