Elredo: The New Voice of Publishing

19. June 2026

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Matěj Schmalz started with a simple mission: help people read more. He built a reading app – Elredo – that today has tens of thousands of users and is used by hundreds of companies as a digital library for their employees. But working closely with content and readers surfaced a problem he had not expected: every time someone asked "when will this book come out in audio?", the answer was almost always the same – it will not. Producing audiobooks is expensive, slow, and rarely financially viable for most titles. The result? Only around 15% of books ever make it to audio. The other 85% stay silent.

Vision

Every book deserves to be heard. In smaller languages, Elredo aims to cover 60% of the audiobook market. In English, 20%. The ambition is to become the global infrastructure for audio publishing.

Gamechanger

Elredo Voice is an AI-powered tool that turns a printed or digital book into a finished audiobook in days – not months. The process combines voice selection matched to tone and genre, intelligent text enrichment for better dramatic pacing, automatic translation into multiple languages before production, text-to-speech with quality control, and final mastering ready for distribution. The result does not sound like a machine – and that is the point. Beyond production, Elredo handles distribution too. Operating on a revenue share model, it works with more than 30 publishers – including Albatros Media, Wiley, and HarperCollins – and places titles on Audible, Spotify, Storytel, BookBeat, and over 140 other platforms. .

Who is it for?

Publishers of all sizes that want to expand their catalogues into audio without high production costs. Primarily publishers working in Czech and other smaller languages, with a growing focus on the English-language market.

What has already worked?

In its first year, Elredo built a portfolio of more than 30 publishing partners across four continents. These include global names such as Wiley, HarperCollins, and Blackstone Publishing, as well as Central European leaders like Albatros Media. From manuscript to distribution, the process takes a fraction of the time and cost of traditional audiobook production.

Want to bring your books to listeners in more languages and across more platforms? Get in touch with Elredo.

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