tale.fyi - A dedicated web home for reading and listening to fiction
Show HN: tale.fyi, we deserve a home for fiction
tale.fyi is a new platform designed to serve as a true home for fiction on the internet, starting with humanity's public domain library. It allows users to read or listen to entire books from a single link, seamlessly switching between text and audio modes. The service saves reading progress locally or syncs across devices upon sign-in, enabling users to share notes with friends. Built on the foundation of Project Gutenberg and LibriVox, tale.fyi offers a completely free experience that prioritizes simplicity and user ownership, challenging the current non-fiction dominance of the web.
The internet is built for non-fiction, and I think that costs us something. We deserve a home for fiction.
- arkh
> 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
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
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
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
- mplanchard
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.