[cyberax]

I used Storyteller to align the most recent Sanderson's novel on audio and the result is 1.7Gb. That's... painful. It resulted in it crashing the reader on Remarkable2 tablet.

I'm now actually working on a Calibre-Web change to strip the audio and media overlay from the books it serves via OPDS.

Then I'll need to tackle cross-device progress sync. This turned out to be surprisingly tricky.

[smoores]

You can’t do much better than that; that’s the size of the audiobook! For what it’s worth, I also used Storyteller on Wind and Truth, and got it down to 1.2GB by using the OPUS codec with a 32 kb/s bitrate.

[cyberax]

Yeah. My current workaround is to create KEPUBs (Kobo-optimized epubs), but that creates an issue with cross-format reading progress sync. This is an interesting task in itself, though.

So I'm trying to design a progress sync protocol. My current idea is to just use several words from the text itself to unambiguously pinpoint the position within a section (chapter).

[smoores]

Is the idea that you have some devices that you want to download just the text to, but have it sync with your other devices? I think we could support that natively, honestly! Storyteller already has the input files, and it uses a text-based position system that doesn’t require the audio to exist. If you’re already doing work on this, maybe we could add it to Storyteller?

[smeej]

Ooh, that's an interesting idea. I only have one device where I would ever want to switch to listening to my book, but a couple others where I would like to read it.