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
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!
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
when i first knew i wanted to align audio to text, i reached for aeneas, which was built for this exact problem/product (https://www.readbeyond.it/aeneas/)
however, it drifted by hundreds of seconds deep into chapters and emits no confidence signal, so i couldn't eval it cleanly
so i switched to a neural acoustic model trained with ctc (meta's massively multilingual speech aligner, it ships inside torchaudio): it outputs a probability for each character at every frame of audio, and viterbi decoding finds the most probable path that spells exactly our text, with a per-word probability
that probability is the gate: a book ships read-along only if its median confidence and coverage clear a bar. moby dick's didn't, so it's honestly text-only
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.
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
I think the dissonance you’re running into here is that places like Reddit are not monolithic. Saying Reddit, basically a very large collection of user submitted writing, is _entirely_ non-fiction is not correct and ignores years of short stories, web serials, fanfiction, role playing, story telling, and all manner of creative fictional writing. I’d wager to say the bulk of such work on the internet exists under the Reddit umbrella, or is at a minimum cross-posted there.
Really nice. I think we might have similar backgrounds. Say hi sometime if you like.
Feedback:
I couldn't work out how to begin audio - it didn't autoplay in Arc (which might block autoplay) but then maybe is also be hiding some sort of audio control. Scroll didn't seem to trigger it.
Actually, after mucking around hard refreshing trying to work out what I'm meant to click after the thing that was meant to carry stuff between devices, A play button did appear. Not sure if it was there and I was being dense (UI feedback), or if it wasn't there.
Actually, I had the old tab open still, and there's no play button there. Guess I had to interact with some element or something.
I can't work out how to sign up, unless it's the field that looks like it's to follow you specifically?
Stuff I've thought about around this:
1. Add global user highlighting of passages + commenting, upvoteable, a la (rap) genius. Work out how to get an LLM to scrape existing criticism to hyperlink that stuff.
2. Add a function that allows users to search and pull files from a remote location to their local device. Let users work out they can point it at Anna's Archive / libgen / wherever. Probably plausibly deniable (official legal advice). This feature would make me actually use this. ISBN is a pretty good uniqueifier.
The publishing world really needs disruption - I don't think it will stop using its weird legacy rights laws (which are extremely hostile to readers) without a shove.
3. I believe, legally, Amazon is able to get away with its TTS function being a shit audiobook without you having to separately purchase an audiobook by calling it an 'accessibility feature', and ensuring the file generated is a single use thing. Seems like an open goal with how low-power TTS models are becoming.
4. Integrate old longform criticism from LRB etc, and new criticism as it is published. It's insane those archives exist, and all books are online, but I can't currently move between stuff using hyperlinks. Criticism should probably be the same data category and treated the same as user comments / reviews / whatever of work, with a 'somebody cared enough to pub this' tag. Integrating new crit alongside comments from your friends gives you a 'feed' type view.
5. I don't care at all about reading user-written fiction. Wattpad etc exist for non-literary-fiction stuff, there's a whole ecosystem of tiny journals for lit fic. I do really care that books are the only commercial form (unlike movies, music) that didn't move from difficult piracy -> kind of piracy -> legit easy access to a reasonable amount of media.
I hope someone sorts that, ideally in a way that is non-destructive in the long term - but I personally believe "the Popcorn Time of Anna's Archive" existing is net-beneficial to humanity even with authors & editors never getting paid.
you wrote brat! i 'own' your book (on kindle, ha, so i'm not sure if that counts as real ownership), and it's on my to-read pile
anyways, i'm going to send you an email
i filed tickets for myself for the play button weirdness, thanks for including the browser, it might be related, and the product feedback around sign up (i didn't want to be too pushy, maybe went too far in the other direction)
for your thinking:
global user highlighting is basically half-done: tap any paragraph to leave a note, however the only way to share that note is with links... tale.fyi needs some way to discover other people's notes. did you ever play dark souls?
i also like integrating other forms of criticism from around the web, hmmm
you don't care about user-written fiction? interesting from you, since you know all the mechanics... is it because it's unedited basically? like when does fiction cross from user-generated to commercial? is it curation?
lol, nice. I think AMZN can revoke your ownership of my work at any point, but your sale is still chalked up towards the total, which seems more like a very expensive library to me except with no incentives (other than user retention) for AMZN to behave like a library.
I never played dark souls… bad attention span. What’s the link? I would just have global highlights as toggleable, personally, with some kind of relative upvote threshold, and ‘crit only’ mode, or something. A link feels hard to discover.
> is it because it's unedited basically? like when does fiction cross from user-generated to commercial? is it curation?
Yeah - though not for subjective quality reasons. I think the lit fic short story ecosystem is most akin to the art world - the gallery and gallerist matter for understanding what you’re getting into with a short story. You’ll know their taste, tone, vibe, editing style, etc. It’s a small world with a low enough barrier to entry - ‘someone who knows how to make a website wants to put it on their website’ - that I think it’d be quite difficult to write an innovative short story and not find an editor in some form.
Subjectively, the lit fic I’m into when I read new work for pure pleasure is such a tiny slice of a tiny genre (‘Gordon Lish-influenced outsider artist maximalism’?) that I think the writer would end up emailing me or someone I knew, and I’d discover their work that way if they were unable to find an editor to work with. Maybe not everyone has that privilege, but I guess the websites people make to solve that problem are already called lit mags.
i used to run a literary journal in college, so i built that dna into tale as 'lists', so that curators can be followed and they can create lists of their favorite work. i dunno if it creates a gallery type environment, but that's the dream
dark souls: in dark souls as you wander around you can leave little notes around the world, and then the game will surface them to other players, almost randomly. players can vote on notes, which makes them appear more or less often. dark souls is a famously obtuse game, so the notes are genuinely helpful sometimes, and sometimes they are trolling you. but it makes the whole experience less lonely. i wonder if that's what people are missing when they read a book: the book _club_ feeling.
Small "marketing" tid-bit. Usually anything that begins with "you/we deserve" is bullshit - because the you/we in question hasn't done shit to deserve anything.
What I think you mean to say is great fiction deserves a home - it highlights reverence for the material rather than trying to appeal to entitlement
Reading a bit of the page,I think "reverence" is indeed your perspective here. It's a great one don't sell it short.
I've gone the opposite route with my recent project, using IRC-style nick + pass, with no email. I prefer this to associating everything with a unique identifier about myself.
oh, i've disliked passwords for my entire career i think:
1. everyone uses the same string
2. if they don't use the same string, they forget which password goes to which site, which is really frustrating
3. if they do use the same string, someone guesses it and the user feels 'hacked'
4. what's up with magic words proving identity anyways?
i personally feel like your computer should know who you are and then pass along that identity to the website, and passkeys get close to this (which i haven't implemented quite yet here)
All of those issues are obviously solved by a password manager. A lot of people use a password manager.
Passkeys are a pretty bad solution as well, because they are supposed to be per-device. What if you use multiple devices (like almost everyone) or want to log in on someone else's device?
I started playing the audio. I liked it. The text was right there matching what I was hearing. I just wish that it highlighted the word in the audio. I'd much prefer a tts version that does that, even if the voice quality is worse. There was a disconnect between my eyes and ears and it felt off.
I installed this as a PWA on my Pixel, and for some reason it keeps auto-rotating (to landscape mode), despite having disabled auto-rotation on my phone.
Is it something you intentionally want or need? It makes it impossible for me to read in bed.
[OP] samuelcole | 7 hours ago
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 | 7 hours ago
[OP] samuelcole | 6 hours ago
but gutenberg and librivox both have french libraries so i could absolutely do that next!
wrsh07 | 7 hours ago
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
[OP] samuelcole | 6 hours ago
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 | 6 hours ago
What does this mean?
[OP] samuelcole | 6 hours ago
when i first knew i wanted to align audio to text, i reached for aeneas, which was built for this exact problem/product (https://www.readbeyond.it/aeneas/)
however, it drifted by hundreds of seconds deep into chapters and emits no confidence signal, so i couldn't eval it cleanly
so i switched to a neural acoustic model trained with ctc (meta's massively multilingual speech aligner, it ships inside torchaudio): it outputs a probability for each character at every frame of audio, and viterbi decoding finds the most probable path that spells exactly our text, with a per-word probability
that probability is the gate: a book ships read-along only if its median confidence and coverage clear a bar. moby dick's didn't, so it's honestly text-only
p-e-w | 5 hours ago
[OP] samuelcole | 4 hours ago
mkl | 7 hours ago
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).
[OP] samuelcole | 6 hours ago
good catch, thanks
mplanchard | 6 hours ago
flutteringfool | 6 hours ago
I used LibraryThing a bit ago, but now I have a note with a list of books I add to regularly.
pickleglitch | 5 hours ago
[OP] samuelcole | 6 hours ago
nor0x | 6 hours ago
piltdownman | 6 hours ago
https://clz.com/books
crtasm | 6 hours ago
bwb | 6 hours ago
bwb | 6 hours ago
If you want to join the beta, just email me at ben@bookdna.com. 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.
UtopiaPunk | 6 hours ago
It uses ActivityPub, so you interact with Mastodon and stuff, if you are into that.
mplanchard | 5 hours ago
ravenical | 5 hours ago
storywatch | an hour ago
https://storywatch.org
ragtagtag | 6 hours ago
[OP] samuelcole | 6 hours ago
tbh, the most exciting thing is the aligner, i might extract that into an open source project... that's a good idea
arkh | 6 hours ago
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/
[OP] samuelcole | 6 hours ago
i'm mostly reacting to the default thing that people scroll are reddit, facebook, instagram, ahem hn
which are all non-fiction... i wanted to build something easy to scroll in line at the grocery store that was fiction
pasc1878 | 6 hours ago
d4mi3n | 5 hours ago
FeepingCreature | 5 hours ago
vunderba | 2 hours ago
storywatch | 27 minutes ago
storywatch | an hour ago
https://forum.questionablequesting.com/
paxys | 5 hours ago
storywatch | an hour ago
gabriel666smith | 6 hours ago
Feedback:
I couldn't work out how to begin audio - it didn't autoplay in Arc (which might block autoplay) but then maybe is also be hiding some sort of audio control. Scroll didn't seem to trigger it.
Actually, after mucking around hard refreshing trying to work out what I'm meant to click after the thing that was meant to carry stuff between devices, A play button did appear. Not sure if it was there and I was being dense (UI feedback), or if it wasn't there.
Actually, I had the old tab open still, and there's no play button there. Guess I had to interact with some element or something.
I can't work out how to sign up, unless it's the field that looks like it's to follow you specifically?
Stuff I've thought about around this:
1. Add global user highlighting of passages + commenting, upvoteable, a la (rap) genius. Work out how to get an LLM to scrape existing criticism to hyperlink that stuff.
2. Add a function that allows users to search and pull files from a remote location to their local device. Let users work out they can point it at Anna's Archive / libgen / wherever. Probably plausibly deniable (official legal advice). This feature would make me actually use this. ISBN is a pretty good uniqueifier.
The publishing world really needs disruption - I don't think it will stop using its weird legacy rights laws (which are extremely hostile to readers) without a shove.
3. I believe, legally, Amazon is able to get away with its TTS function being a shit audiobook without you having to separately purchase an audiobook by calling it an 'accessibility feature', and ensuring the file generated is a single use thing. Seems like an open goal with how low-power TTS models are becoming.
4. Integrate old longform criticism from LRB etc, and new criticism as it is published. It's insane those archives exist, and all books are online, but I can't currently move between stuff using hyperlinks. Criticism should probably be the same data category and treated the same as user comments / reviews / whatever of work, with a 'somebody cared enough to pub this' tag. Integrating new crit alongside comments from your friends gives you a 'feed' type view.
5. I don't care at all about reading user-written fiction. Wattpad etc exist for non-literary-fiction stuff, there's a whole ecosystem of tiny journals for lit fic. I do really care that books are the only commercial form (unlike movies, music) that didn't move from difficult piracy -> kind of piracy -> legit easy access to a reasonable amount of media.
I hope someone sorts that, ideally in a way that is non-destructive in the long term - but I personally believe "the Popcorn Time of Anna's Archive" existing is net-beneficial to humanity even with authors & editors never getting paid.
[OP] samuelcole | 6 hours ago
anyways, i'm going to send you an email
i filed tickets for myself for the play button weirdness, thanks for including the browser, it might be related, and the product feedback around sign up (i didn't want to be too pushy, maybe went too far in the other direction)
for your thinking:
global user highlighting is basically half-done: tap any paragraph to leave a note, however the only way to share that note is with links... tale.fyi needs some way to discover other people's notes. did you ever play dark souls?
i also like integrating other forms of criticism from around the web, hmmm
you don't care about user-written fiction? interesting from you, since you know all the mechanics... is it because it's unedited basically? like when does fiction cross from user-generated to commercial? is it curation?
gabriel666smith | 5 hours ago
I never played dark souls… bad attention span. What’s the link? I would just have global highlights as toggleable, personally, with some kind of relative upvote threshold, and ‘crit only’ mode, or something. A link feels hard to discover.
> is it because it's unedited basically? like when does fiction cross from user-generated to commercial? is it curation?
Yeah - though not for subjective quality reasons. I think the lit fic short story ecosystem is most akin to the art world - the gallery and gallerist matter for understanding what you’re getting into with a short story. You’ll know their taste, tone, vibe, editing style, etc. It’s a small world with a low enough barrier to entry - ‘someone who knows how to make a website wants to put it on their website’ - that I think it’d be quite difficult to write an innovative short story and not find an editor in some form.
Subjectively, the lit fic I’m into when I read new work for pure pleasure is such a tiny slice of a tiny genre (‘Gordon Lish-influenced outsider artist maximalism’?) that I think the writer would end up emailing me or someone I knew, and I’d discover their work that way if they were unable to find an editor to work with. Maybe not everyone has that privilege, but I guess the websites people make to solve that problem are already called lit mags.
[OP] samuelcole | 4 hours ago
dark souls: in dark souls as you wander around you can leave little notes around the world, and then the game will surface them to other players, almost randomly. players can vote on notes, which makes them appear more or less often. dark souls is a famously obtuse game, so the notes are genuinely helpful sometimes, and sometimes they are trolling you. but it makes the whole experience less lonely. i wonder if that's what people are missing when they read a book: the book _club_ feeling.
khanhnguyen8386 | 6 hours ago
[OP] samuelcole | 5 hours ago
xyzelement | 6 hours ago
What I think you mean to say is great fiction deserves a home - it highlights reverence for the material rather than trying to appeal to entitlement
Reading a bit of the page,I think "reverence" is indeed your perspective here. It's a great one don't sell it short.
[OP] samuelcole | 5 hours ago
noted for next time: the great fiction deserves something, we may not
osamabinladen | 5 hours ago
[OP] samuelcole | 5 hours ago
yreg | 5 hours ago
Why? What's so horrible about passwords? They work so well with password managers.
I hate this forced email sign-in bullshit that's spreading like covid.
ang_cire | 5 hours ago
[OP] samuelcole | an hour ago
1. everyone uses the same string
2. if they don't use the same string, they forget which password goes to which site, which is really frustrating
3. if they do use the same string, someone guesses it and the user feels 'hacked'
4. what's up with magic words proving identity anyways?
i personally feel like your computer should know who you are and then pass along that identity to the website, and passkeys get close to this (which i haven't implemented quite yet here)
yreg | 40 minutes ago
Passkeys are a pretty bad solution as well, because they are supposed to be per-device. What if you use multiple devices (like almost everyone) or want to log in on someone else's device?
Why not offer both passwords and magic links?
tim-projects | 5 hours ago
[OP] samuelcole | 59 minutes ago
i might add this as an option in the future, thanks!
janrakete | 5 hours ago
[OP] samuelcole | 58 minutes ago
JunoNgx | 3 hours ago
Is it something you intentionally want or need? It makes it impossible for me to read in bed.
[OP] samuelcole | an hour ago
sadly it may take a bit for your phone to pick up the new manifest, an uninstall and reinstall might fix it