It uses whatever text-to-speech software you have installed on Windows - the basic system software, if nothing else. “Select mode” will allow you to select individual paragraphs to be read aloud, and “stop” will stop reading. Hitting “play/pause” will start your computer reading at the top of the current screen it will highlight the current paragraph as it reads. At the bottom, you’ll find three new options: “play/pause,” “select mode,” and “stop.” (You may need to resize the viewer window to give them room to show up.) Once you have, pick a book and double-click it to launch Calibre’s e-book viewer, then look at the bottom of the sidebar of icons on the left.

Once you’ve installed it, you may need to restart Calibre for it to show up. This one probably doesn’t, but it’s worth remembering any time you install a third-party tool. You don’t need to unzip it Calibre takes care of all that.Ĭalibre will give you a warning about plugins potentially containing malicious software. Choose “Load plugin from file” at lower right, then navigate to where you saved that zip file. Click on the gears-meshing “Preferences” icon at the top right of the screen, then click on the green puzzle piece “Plugins” at the bottom of this window. To install it, download the zip file from the Mobileread forum post, then launch Calibre.

The plugin uses Windows’s built-in text-to-speech system so only works on Windows, and is pretty primitive thus far - the programmer said he just wrote it over a weekend and called it a “very rough alpha.” Still, it shows some promise. A programmer on Mobileread has come out with a new Calibre plugin that will enable text-to-speech from Calibre’s book viewer software.

Calibre ebook reader for pc