Listen to an EPUB on your iPhone

Tap the speaker and Peony reads your book to you, from the page you are on, with the sentence underlined and the page turning by itself.

How to start

Open an EPUB and tap the speaker button at the top of the page. Reading starts from where you are. Tap again to pause and again to resume. The sentence being read is underlined and the page turns to follow it, even when a sentence runs across a page break.

Speed

Open the Aa settings and choose Slow, Normal, Fast or Faster under Read aloud speed. A change applies from the next sentence.

Screen locked, other apps open

Peony keeps reading with the screen locked or while you use another app. The lock screen and Control Center show the book's cover, title and author with play and pause. When you come back to Peony, the page jumps to where the voice is.

Offline and private

Read aloud uses the voices that come with your iPhone, so it works with no connection, and nothing is sent anywhere: not the text, not what you listen to.

Getting a better voice

Peony speaks with your iPhone's voice for the book's language. For a more natural sound, open Settings, then Accessibility, then Spoken Content, then Voices, and download an Enhanced or Premium voice for your language. Peony does not have its own voice picker yet.

What it does not read

PDFs that open as pages are not read aloud. Convert them to an EPUB first: see converting a PDF to EPUB.
Pictures, and the text inside pictures, are skipped.
Turning the page by hand while it reads is overridden by the next sentence; pause first if you want to look around.

New to Peony's reading tools? How to read a PDF on an iPhone covers the rest.

Peony is on the App Store: get it for your iPhone.

More guides

Peony is an iPhone app for reading EPUB and PDF books you already own. See the home page, the FAQ and the privacy policy.