Read ePub Books and Word Docs Aloud on iPhone

Q: Can I keep listening with the screen locked?

Yes, when the book is playing from Documents. Pause and resume both work straight from the lock screen.

It reads your files, not the store's

Any ePub or Word file you can open in the Files app gets read with the voices already built into iOS — public-domain books, course packs, reports, your own writing.

What it can't open is anything protected by DRM, Kindle and Apple Books purchases included. Those stores lock the file to their own apps on purpose, and there's no way around that here.

Steps: import and listen

Put the .epub or .docx file somewhere the Files app can see it.
Tap the + button in the Reader or the Documents tab to open Import.
Under Files, pick EPUB Book (.epub) or Word Document (.docx) and select the file.
The text comes out and gets saved as a document named after the file. Started from the Reader? It loads there too.
For a book, open Documents, tap it, tap Start Reading. It plays in the background, with a mini player at the bottom showing the current word.
Next time, tap Continue Reading on the document, or use the Continue Reading cards at the top of Documents.

How the text is extracted

ePub: the app follows the book's own chapter order and strips the formatting out. Pictures are skipped entirely.
Word: paragraphs come through as plain text. Images vanish and tables get flattened into lines of text, which reads oddly if the original had a lot of numbers in a grid.
Either way, the whole file becomes one document — no chapter list, so lean on the progress percentage to find your place again.

Keeping track of something long

The document sheet shows the word count, an estimated listening time at 150 words a minute, and Reading Progress as a plain percentage of characters already read.

Example: a novel imported from ePub
Detail	Value
Words	80,000
Estimated time shown	533 min
Characters in the document	450,000
Last position	character 135,000
Reading Progress	30%

Speed genuinely changes the math at novel length: the estimate above assumes normal speed, but at Fast (1.5x) the same book takes two thirds of the time. Set it in Speed & Pitch, or Voice Settings in the Voices tab, where Volume also lives for document playback.

Things that trip people up

Use Start Reading in Documents for anything book-length, not the Reader — Pause there restarts from the beginning every time.
Swipe right on a book to mark it Favorite; it then shows up in the Favorites smart playlist.
Nothing imports and the sheet just sits there? The file is probably DRM-protected or damaged.
A Word file with text sitting in text boxes or shapes can come out missing chunks. Paste those parts into the Reader separately instead.

Questions and answers

Can I read a Word document aloud for free?

Word, ePub and PDF import are all Premium. On the free version, copy the text elsewhere and use Paste from Clipboard in the Reader, counted against the free daily character allowance.

Can it read Kindle or Apple Books purchases?

No. Those are DRM-protected and only open inside their own apps. DRM-free ePub files work fine.

Does it read the pictures or tables?

No. Only the text comes in — images are skipped and tables turn into plain lines of text.

Can I keep listening with the screen locked?

Yes, when the book is playing from Documents. Pause and resume both work straight from the lock screen.

How to listen to a PDF on your iPhone like an audiobook · Text Reader Narrator

How to listen to an ePub book or Word document on iPhone