Show HN: Lue – Terminal eBook Reader with Text-to-Speech

Hello,

Just went live on GitHub with this project.

I really enjoy listening to my eBooks as audiobooks but was frustrated by the available options. Converting books into audiobooks with scripts is tedious, and most tools stumble over footnotes, headers, or formatting. I wanted something simple: just throw a book at it, and it starts reading immediately without any clicking or loading.

I also wanted it to be customizable and modular because new, better TTS engines are released all the time. For this initial release, I settled on Edge and Kokoro because they’re both fast (real-time) and good quality. I’ve already made modules for Kitten TTS, Gemini and a few others, and they work too. So I hope this setup is future-proof.

Here’s what Lue supports:

Multi-format: EPUB, PDF, TXT, DOCX, HTML, RTF, and Markdown.

Modular TTS system: Default Edge TTS (online) and Kokoro TTS (offline/local), with an architecture to add more models.

Rich terminal UI: Full keyboard and mouse support, customizable color themes, smooth scrolling.

Smart persistence: Automatically saves reading progress across sessions.

Cross-platform & multilingual: macOS, Linux, Windows, supporting 100+ languages.

I’d love feedback on both usability and the TTS experience. Are there any features you wish it had?