Éist
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About

Hi — I’m William, and I built Eist because I was tired of buying audiobooks for books I already owned.

The origin story (the short version)

For years I’d been buying EPUBs from Humble Bundle, indie publishers, and DRM-free shops. The collection grew. The listening time grew too — long commutes, runs, chores. But almost none of those books had affordable audio versions, and the ones that did meant paying again on Audible for content I already owned.

I tried every text-to-speech app on iOS and Android. They were either subscription-locked, capped after twenty minutes, riddled with ads, or so robotic that ten minutes left a headache. Most uploaded my book text to a server before reading it back, which felt absurd for a personal copy of Anna Karenina.

So I built the thing I wanted to use.

What Eist is, in one paragraph

Eist is a free Android and iOS app that converts any EPUB or PDF on your phone into a natural-sounding audiobook using on-device AI text-to-speech. No internet required after the initial voice download. No account. No ads. No tracking. No per-book purchase. The free tier is unlimited forever. The premium tier ($4.99/month after a 3-month free trial) adds 20+ voices and instant pre-synthesised playback.

Why I think this matters

Audiobooks have done something important — they’ve let busy people, commuters, parents, drivers, and accessibility users keep reading. But audiobook publishers only narrate a fraction of all the books in the world, charge per-title for the ones they do, and increasingly lock content behind subscription walls. Meanwhile, every modern phone has enough on-device AI to narrate any book you own. Eist closes that gap.

For listeners with dyslexia, low vision, or other reading-related accessibility needs, a free, unlimited, offline TTS audiobook reader isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a baseline that the audiobook industry has spent the last decade failing to deliver.

About me

William O’Meara — based in Ireland, full-stack developer, long-time EPUB hoarder. I run Eist solo. The privacy stance is genuine because I designed and built the whole stack myself — there is no marketing team to override.

Why "Éist"?

Éist (pronounced "aysht") is the Irish word for listen. It’s also the imperative form — closer in feeling to "hear this" than to a passive label. The name is meant as a small gesture toward the Irish language and a reminder that listening is an active choice, not background filler.

What Eist will never do

  • Upload your books to a cloud
  • Show you ads
  • Require an account
  • Cap your free listening hours
  • Lock content behind opaque paywalls
  • Sell your data — there is none to sell because we don’t collect it

Every one of those is a hill I plan to die on.

What I’d love to hear from you

If you use Eist and have ideas, complaints, accessibility needs, weird use cases, or just want to swap audiobook recommendations — email me at hello@eist.app. The fastest way to get a feature built is to write a good email about why it matters.

Last reviewed: May 15, 2026. Page lives at https://eist.app/about.