I use Kindle Whisper Sync most days. It lets me listen to books at the gym in the morning and then keep reading on the kindle app before bed at night. The critical thing is that I can read and listen to the same book and it tracks my progress regardless of how I'm consuming the book. This is the only way I can spend 2-3hrs reading/listening per day. If I didn't have Whisper Sync then I'd only have 1hr to read each day and my progress would be so slow that I lose interest in the book.
But my big problem is that so few books have Whisper Sync enabled. I have loads of epub digital books and PDF files of reports and other things that I want this functionality for. Whisper Sync doesn't support all these things.
Could it be easy for an engineer to make this app using Cursor or something similar? It needs web app/iPhone/iPad apps and I could upload any ePub or PDF file and consume them all like Whisper Sync. It would use OpenAI TTS API for high quality audio.
I cannot overstate how badly I want this app. If someone here makes it then I'll pay $50/m baseline plus all the API fees needed for TTS API. I'd happily pay $20 per book, which I think would cover most books based on my reading of the API pricing docs.
If this app existed I would make 10x more progress on my reading backlog. It would be more important than any of the other apps on my iPhone currently.
Perhaps you or a HN-reader can fill in the gaps and make it work.
I used to hear executives who use it all the time while I was an executive at Sony Pictures.