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- I couldn't find a direct option to adjust the font size. Could you add that?by janrakete
- yeah right now you have to use browser zoom, but noted!by samuelcole
- > 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.
by yreg - 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)
by samuelcole - 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.by ang_cire
- 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.
by xyzelement - awww thanks, you get it
noted for next time: the great fiction deserves something, we may not
by samuelcole - 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.
by JunoNgx - good catch, fixed: orientation: 'any' was meant as 'don't lock the phone' and android treated it the exact opposite. removed it
sadly it may take a bit for your phone to pick up the new manifest, an uninstall and reinstall might fix it
by samuelcole - 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.by tim-projects
- good news: i already store the word level alignments, i just felt like words lighting up were distracting
i might add this as an option in the future, thanks!
by samuelcole - 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.by nehasips
- there's a subtle line on the left that should track vaguely where you are in the paragraph, i added a little easter egg yesterday: if you hold the play button the indicator grows to highlight the lines in the text, so that may help
but in general: noted that it's hard to follow along!
by samuelcole - 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!
- thanks! i really appreciate that you get it: 'whispersync for the open web' is a really great description, i might use it ;-)by samuelcole
- i really loved this description, and i wrote up the technique into a full tale:
https://tale.fyi/@sam/aligning-800-audiobooks-8-000-hours-to...
by samuelcole - 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.by mplanchard
- For fanfiction and web fiction, give us a tryby storywatch
- do you think there's space for that? i really wanted to build that too, but there is already goodreads, fable, storygraph, bookly, etcby samuelcole
- CLZ Books is sort of in that domain, and is the best solution I came across for cataloguing and tracking my 1000+ post 1970s booksby piltdownman
- 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.
- You want https://hardcover.app/.by ravenical
- Have you tried Bookwyrm? https://bookwyrm.social/
It uses ActivityPub, so you interact with Mastodon and stuff, if you are into that.
by UtopiaPunk - I'm not logged in to https://hardcover.app/ right now, perhaps someone can confirm if it allows logging multiple reads.by crtasm
- I'm building this -> https://building.bookdna.com/roadmap/
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.
by bwb - 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
by samuelcole - Really nice, listened to a bit of Dracula and didn't expect to be so hooked :)
Apart from that, on mobile I'm having some troubles:
- scrolling at any time stops the audio and the audio will only start again at the paragraph start, not where it left off - the paragraph doesn't scroll automatically if it's longer than the screen height. I can't scroll down because of issue 1 (I like to read+listen) - I can't seem to click into a paragraph/sentence to continue reading from there.
Again, well done! I love these kinds of projects.
- 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
by wrsh07 - just did the explicit 'read from here' line, to set the watermark precisely (it also controls where the play button starts from)
check it out! let me know what you think
by samuelcole - 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!
by samuelcole