I want to extract text from epub file for my text to speech iOS app.
It would be great if I can do that within iOS device using some library, but I also wonder if it should be handled on the server side.
Does anyone have an idea about how to do that?
For example, Voice Dream extract text from epub formats. http://www.voicedream.com/?page_id=134
ePub is a ZIP file with an XML manifest containing the summary (and some meta-data) and refering to a set of HTML (Have a look to the specifications for all the details: http://idpf.org/epub) If you want to do it on device, you'll very likely have to write your own code: open the zip, find your way in the manifest to locate you text, then remove all the HTML tags to get plain text. If you can do it server side, it will be easier: you can use Apache Tika (http://tika.apache.org/) which handles ePub (and many other formats).
It's difficult to be more precise as you didn't explain how you get the epub and how you select which part of the epub will be locuted...