7 comments

  • arkh 2 minutes ago
    > the internet was being built around non-fiction

    I guess you don't tread the same internet waters.

    https://www.royalroad.com/home https://archiveofourown.org/ and the good old link rings like https://topwebfiction.com/

  • mkl 30 minutes ago
    We have many homes for fiction already. Mine is my ebook reader. For many it's their bookshelf or local library.

    First impression: autoplay of noisy audio when you go to a book is awful. Please don't do this.

    > Humanity has a massive corpus of fiction, thanks to copyright law...

    Seems a strange thing to credit first.

    https://tale.fyi/tell says you need to sign in to tell your own story, but there doesn't seem to be a way to do that (I'm on Firefox Android).

  • wrsh07 41 minutes ago
    This is great! I would love an explicit "set bookmark to here" button if I scroll up from the high watermark

    I discovered the reset, but it took a minute and I expect given the way I read being able to explicitly walk the high watermark back a bit would be nice (maybe that's doable if you select text? I didn't try!)

    The format is nice, I love standard ebooks

    I opened Moby Dick but didn't see how to listen to it on my phone, not sure what the status of the "listen" effort is.

    I listened to some books from standard ebooks using eleven labs, but I'm really excited about a better implementation

    • samuelcole 19 minutes ago
      moby dick didn't align properly, there's a confidence gate it didn't pass.

      i know, it makes me sad too, i'll keep working on it

      this is the list of everything: https://tale.fyi/audiobooks

      librivox is all human volunteers, so i think it makes a difference from eleven labs, but i might add a fallback to ai readings for folks who want that

      reset feedback noted!

      • p-e-w 9 minutes ago
        > moby dick didn't align properly, there's a confidence gate it didn't pass.

        What does this mean?

  • mplanchard 28 minutes ago
    Unrelated, but all I want is a letterboxd for books, with the light social aspect, the ability to log a read multiple times, and with a great interface. I read my hope for this into the title of this post, unfortunately.
    • bwb 5 minutes ago
      I'm building this -> https://building.bookdna.com/roadmap/

      If you want to join the beta, just email me at [email protected]. We've got about 100 people using it right now.

      We are working on goodreads/storygraph imports, and then adding folders. It already supports multiple reads and more.

    • crtasm 13 minutes ago
      I'm not logged in to https://hardcover.app/ right now, perhaps someone can confirm if it allows logging multiple reads.
      • bwb 4 minutes ago
        Hardcover definitely supports multiple reads. I've got two in mine right now.
    • piltdownman 18 minutes ago
      CLZ Books is sort of in that domain, and is the best solution I came across for cataloguing and tracking my 1000+ post 1970s books

      https://clz.com/books

    • flutteringfool 23 minutes ago
      That would be nice. Wonder if there'll be such a service with the federated small web. Good reads is too heavy on the social aspect for my taste.

      I used LibraryThing a bit ago, but now I have a note with a list of books I add to regularly.

    • samuelcole 21 minutes ago
      do you think there's space for that? i really wanted to build that too, but there is already goodreads, fable, storygraph, bookly, etc
    • nor0x 20 minutes ago
      have you seen https://literal.club ? For me it works quite well, i can log my reads there and can follow accounts of friends who have a good book taste
  • ragtagtag 12 minutes ago
    This looks lovely, thank you. Is there a source repository available?
  • samuelcole 1 hour ago
    i've been building this over the last two weeks, it first started as a reader for standard ebooks (https://standardebooks.org/), with clean typography, progress tracking, and nice deep linking (try clicking on a paragraph to create a mark and copy it to your clipboard)

    but i think i really unlocked something when i discovered the amazing recordings on https://librivox.org, i've been spending the last few days frying my macbook's gpu to do neural alignment so that you can sync an audiobook with its text counterpart, to make switching between the text and the audio seamless

    it's a ctc forced-alignment over the whole audiobook, keyed to the same paragraph anchors i used for progress tracking and linking

    i think it's really cool? let me know

  • deviation 51 minutes ago
    Fantastic. Have you considered supporting other languages, too? Such as French?
    • samuelcole 23 minutes ago
      the aligner already supports french (it's meta's massively multilingual speech model under the hood), so it would all work today, but i started on standard ebooks, which is english-only.

      but gutenberg and librivox both have french libraries so i could absolutely do that next!