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For the "doesn’t sound like a stuttering robot + stays off any lists” problem, local/on-device is the way to go: e.g. tools built around Kokoro (the small open neural model) are currently the sweet spot: natural enough for actual books, runs entirely in the browser or on your machine with no uploads, and you can export the audio if you want. A few browser extensions do exactly this offline after a one-time model download.
I use Calibre and it just added proper Kokoro support for its read aloud feature, which is nice if you’re already managing your ebooks there.
I also made one myself for personal use: outside of the Monero-related side of things I mostly live in "I make my own stuff on demand as I like them" mode :) Cloned a voice I wanted, it reads my articles now, and I made sure it doesn’t track me either :)) If you have access/subscription to a decent model you can literally have almost anything on demand (I do that all the time when it's not related to the darker/Monero side of my life :)
And yeah, public domain is the best. IP is the worst.
Knowledge should be free!
Do you use an ereader or have a good TTS system that doesn't sound like a stuttering robot? I want to read more prohibited books or books that would land me on a list, but without that last part and it seems digital consumption is the only decent way to do that.
Also, just public domain books broadly. Public domain is the best and IP is the worst