Show HN: tale.fyi, we deserve a home for fiction (tale.fyi)

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

Fantastic. Have you considered supporting other languages, too? Such as French?

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

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).

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.

This looks lovely, thank you. Is there a source repository available?

> 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/

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.

Forced alignment using CTC over LibriVox recordings to sync text and audio is a brilliant use of compute. Whispersync for the open web—love it!

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.

it would be nice to have a light mode option since this is unusable for me otherwise

> no password, ever. we email a code that works once and expires in ten minutes.

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.

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 couldn't find a direct option to adjust the font size. Could you add that?

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.

Another small PWA-specific thing is the theme colour. I think you are only listening to `prefers-color-scheme`, so when the user manually switches between dark/light mode, there's a mismatch between the OS' status bar and the app's UI.

The solution to sync this correctly (or at least, the best one I have found so far) is to watch to the theme state change of the app, then query for `meta[name='theme-color']`, and set manually its `content` attribute to your desirable colour.

The theme colour you declare in the manifest and `<head>` of the html index is more of a fallback than anything.

I'm sure you'd figure it out, but let me know if you need something more detail; I would be happy to help.

I tried listening to Dracula, found the audio a bit monotonous tbh, but love the overall idea! It was smooth reading the story alongside.. though I do believe that you should either highlight the line being said out loud, or scroll to the section, or basically do something that makes it easier to track where the audio is right now. Would be very helpful if I missed a word or two, and just kinda want to go back and read them instead of looping the audio back.