OplæsHow to make Apple Books read aloud
Apple Books has no read-aloud button for ebooks, but the iPhone can read them to you anyway. Turn on Speak Screen under Settings › Accessibility › Read & Speak (Spoken Content on iOS 17 and 18). Then open the book in Books and swipe down with two fingers from the top of the screen. The page is read aloud in the voice and at the speed you’ve chosen, and a small controller lets you pause or speed up. Audiobooks are a separate thing: you get them in the store’s Audiobooks section, and they play like music.
Step by step
- Open Settings › Accessibility › Read & Speak (Spoken Content on iOS 17 and 18) and turn on Speak Screen.
- Open Books and tap the book you want to hear.
- Swipe down with two fingers from the top of the screen.
- Use the controller to pause, change the speed or skip back.
If the reading stops at the end of a page, turn the page and swipe down again. You can also ask Siri to “Speak screen”. Apple’s guide: Hear iPhone speak the screen, selected text, and typing feedback.
Follow the words while it reads
Under Read & Speak › Speak Screen › Highlighting, you can have each word light up as it’s spoken. Books also has a Line Guide: tap the page, turn it on from the menu at the bottom, and everything except the current line dims. Both help if you tend to lose your place.
Apple’s guide: Read books in the Books app on iPhone. More tools like these: apps for dyslexia on iPhone.
Accessibility Reader: the page in your own layout
On iOS 26 and later, open the book and then Accessibility Reader from Control Center (or triple-click the side button, if you’ve added it to the Accessibility Shortcut). It shows the text full-screen in the font, colors and spacing you pick, and the play button reads it aloud. Turn on Autoplay under Settings › Accessibility › Read & Speak › Accessibility Reader if you want it to start reading straight away. See Read or listen to text in apps with Accessibility Reader.
Audiobooks and digital narration
Audiobooks in Books are their own titles in the store. Some of them are read by Apple’s digital voices instead of a human narrator: authors and publishers can have an ebook turned into an audiobook that way (Apple Books digital narration). Only the author or publisher can do that, so you can’t switch it on for a book you already own. The voices Apple lists are English, with American and British accents.
Your own ePub and PDF files
Got an ePub or a PDF in Mail, Messages or another app? Open it, tap Share and choose Books, and it joins your library, where Speak Screen reads it like any other book (Apple: Read PDF documents in the Books app). Most books bought in the Book Store are copy-protected, and those only open in Books.
For long English or Danish texts there’s also Oplæs, the app I made. Add the ePub or PDF from Files or the Share menu, and Oplæs reads it aloud in natural voices, highlights every word and remembers where you stopped. It runs on the iPhone, so it works offline, and it costs $1.99 once with no ads and no account. More on PDFs: how to read a PDF aloud on iPhone.