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

tale.fyi

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

#1
for decades, i have been concerned that the internet was being built around non-fiction, so i built something to show how we could celebrate great fiction on the web.

i started with an amazing library from the public domain, and i also added tools to add your own stories

super interested to hear any feedback, and if you read anything good!

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

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

#2
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

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

#4
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

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

#5
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).

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

#7

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.

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.

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

#8

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

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!

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

#9

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.

do you think there's space for that? i really wanted to build that too, but there is already goodreads, fable, storygraph, bookly, etc

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

#10

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
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