ebook-speaker/UTF-8 long files

[Linux for blind general discussion]

So I just ran into this and was wondering if anyone else has. I've 
converted ebooks to .txt with ebook-converr and wanted to run them by 
ebook-speaker. It tells me to wait since it's a UTF-8 file with long 
phrases and give sme numbers, then does....precisely nothing, boots me 
back to the terminal with a bell sound...

Any ideas?