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

[samuelcole]

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!

[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/

[FeepingCreature]

https://fanfiction.net/ https://forums.spacebattles.com/ https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/ https://questden.org/ and of course usenet before it. the internet was always built around fiction.

[storywatch]

You forgot questionable questing

https://forum.questionablequesting.com/

[FeepingCreature]

I mean I didn't want to link the pornfic site lol. I didn't link asstr either.

[storywatch]

Questionable questing came out of SpaceBattles/Sufficient Velocity during one of their schisms.

[vunderba]

Wattpads also been around for nearly 20 years as well.

[storywatch]

They went full corporate. Naver (Korean manhwa conglomerate) bought them.

[samuelcole]

i know, i'm being a bit emotional here, ha

i'm mostly reacting to the default thing that people scroll are reddit, facebook, instagram, ahem hn

which are all non-fiction... i wanted to build something easy to scroll in line at the grocery store that was fiction

[d4mi3n]

I think the dissonance you’re running into here is that places like Reddit are not monolithic. Saying Reddit, basically a very large collection of user submitted writing, is _entirely_ non-fiction is not correct and ignores years of short stories, web serials, fanfiction, role playing, story telling, and all manner of creative fictional writing. I’d wager to say the bulk of such work on the internet exists under the Reddit umbrella, or is at a minimum cross-posted there.

[pasc1878]

Many items on those are fiction. Some even intentionally so.

[paxys]

Also LinkedIn, Reddit, most Substack, large chunks of HN…

[storywatch]

These days Patreon is another big platform

[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).

[samuelcole]

added a link to sign in on https://tale.fyi/tell

good catch, thanks

[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]

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!

[p-e-w]

> moby dick didn't align properly, there's a confidence gate it didn't pass.

What does this mean?

[samuelcole]

well! (i've been waiting for someone to ask ha)

when i first knew i wanted to align audio to text, i reached for aeneas, which was built for this exact problem/product (https://www.readbeyond.it/aeneas/)

however, it drifted by hundreds of seconds deep into chapters and emits no confidence signal, so i couldn't eval it cleanly

so i switched to a neural acoustic model trained with ctc (meta's massively multilingual speech aligner, it ships inside torchaudio): it outputs a probability for each character at every frame of audio, and viterbi decoding finds the most probable path that spells exactly our text, with a per-word probability

that probability is the gate: a book ships read-along only if its median confidence and coverage clear a bar. moby dick's didn't, so it's honestly text-only

[p-e-w]

Could the problem be Moby Dick’s infamously large vocabulary, which contains words used essentially nowhere else?

[samuelcole]

i actually had an out-of-memory bug, which i've since fixed. chewing through it now to see if we can get it

[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

[BreakMaker9000]

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.

[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.

[bwb]

I'm building this -> https://building.bookdna.com/roadmap/

If you want to join the beta, just email me at [e-mail]. 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.

[UtopiaPunk]

Have you tried Bookwyrm? https://bookwyrm.social/

It uses ActivityPub, so you interact with Mastodon and stuff, if you are into that.

[crtasm]

I'm not logged in to https://hardcover.app/ right now, perhaps someone can confirm if it allows logging multiple reads.

[bwb]

Hardcover definitely supports multiple reads. I've got two in mine right now.

[ravenical]

You want https://hardcover.app/.

[flutteringfool]

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.

[pickleglitch]

https://bookwyrm.social/ is exactly that. It's often sluggish, and not the best UX, but it's usable. I'm hoping it continues to improve.

[storywatch]

For fanfiction and web fiction, give us a try

https://storywatch.org

[piltdownman]

CLZ Books is sort of in that domain, and is the best solution I came across for cataloguing and tracking my 1000+ post 1970s books

https://clz.com/books

[samuelcole]

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

[mplanchard]

Not going to reply to all the comments, but so glad I posted this! Lots of great recs I hadn’t heard of to check out

[nor0x]

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

[khanhnguyen8386]

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!

[samuelcole]

thanks! i really appreciate that you get it: 'whispersync for the open web' is a really great description, i might use it ;-)

[tim-projects]

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.

[samuelcole]

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!

[JunoNgx]

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.

[samuelcole]

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

[JunoNgx]

Thanks for the quick fix.

Great work, btw. I'm going to immensely enjoy this app :D

[JunoNgx]

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.

[samuelcole]

i think i fixed it? let me know

i love that you're using the PWA... i love PWAs, so i added fun stuff like offline support, but i wasn't sure if anyone would find it

[JunoNgx]

Can confirm it has been fixed.

I, too, love PWAs to death and has pretty much dedicated my entire programming life (outside of work) to them. I had a good chuckle when I even saw the screenshots you setup for the installation prompt. Thanks for being part of the crusade :D

[xyzelement]

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.

[samuelcole]

awww thanks, you get it

noted for next time: the great fiction deserves something, we may not

[yreg]

> 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.

[samuelcole]

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)

[yreg]

All of those issues are obviously solved by a password manager. A lot of people use a password manager.

Passkeys are a pretty bad solution as well, because they are supposed to be per-device. What if you use multiple devices (like almost everyone) or want to log in on someone else's device?

Why not offer both passwords and magic links?

[ang_cire]

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.

[janrakete]

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

[samuelcole]

yeah right now you have to use browser zoom, but noted!

[deviation]

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

[samuelcole]

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!

[ragtagtag]

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

[samuelcole]

not right now! i'm still deciding what i want to do with this

tbh, the most exciting thing is the aligner, i might extract that into an open source project... that's a good idea

[osamabinladen]

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

[samuelcole]

it follows your browser/device preference, but noted that a manual override would be a useful setting!

[samuelcole]

shipped! look for a sun/moon icon near the tale.fyi title at the top

[gabriel666smith]

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.

[samuelcole]

you wrote brat! i 'own' your book (on kindle, ha, so i'm not sure if that counts as real ownership), and it's on my to-read pile

anyways, i'm going to send you an email

i filed tickets for myself for the play button weirdness, thanks for including the browser, it might be related, and the product feedback around sign up (i didn't want to be too pushy, maybe went too far in the other direction)

for your thinking:

global user highlighting is basically half-done: tap any paragraph to leave a note, however the only way to share that note is with links... tale.fyi needs some way to discover other people's notes. did you ever play dark souls?

i also like integrating other forms of criticism from around the web, hmmm

you don't care about user-written fiction? interesting from you, since you know all the mechanics... is it because it's unedited basically? like when does fiction cross from user-generated to commercial? is it curation?

[gabriel666smith]

lol, nice. I think AMZN can revoke your ownership of my work at any point, but your sale is still chalked up towards the total, which seems more like a very expensive library to me except with no incentives (other than user retention) for AMZN to behave like a library.

I never played dark souls… bad attention span. What’s the link? I would just have global highlights as toggleable, personally, with some kind of relative upvote threshold, and ‘crit only’ mode, or something. A link feels hard to discover.

> is it because it's unedited basically? like when does fiction cross from user-generated to commercial? is it curation?

Yeah - though not for subjective quality reasons. I think the lit fic short story ecosystem is most akin to the art world - the gallery and gallerist matter for understanding what you’re getting into with a short story. You’ll know their taste, tone, vibe, editing style, etc. It’s a small world with a low enough barrier to entry - ‘someone who knows how to make a website wants to put it on their website’ - that I think it’d be quite difficult to write an innovative short story and not find an editor in some form.

Subjectively, the lit fic I’m into when I read new work for pure pleasure is such a tiny slice of a tiny genre (‘Gordon Lish-influenced outsider artist maximalism’?) that I think the writer would end up emailing me or someone I knew, and I’d discover their work that way if they were unable to find an editor to work with. Maybe not everyone has that privilege, but I guess the websites people make to solve that problem are already called lit mags.

[samuelcole]

i used to run a literary journal in college, so i built that dna into tale as 'lists', so that curators can be followed and they can create lists of their favorite work. i dunno if it creates a gallery type environment, but that's the dream

dark souls: in dark souls as you wander around you can leave little notes around the world, and then the game will surface them to other players, almost randomly. players can vote on notes, which makes them appear more or less often. dark souls is a famously obtuse game, so the notes are genuinely helpful sometimes, and sometimes they are trolling you. but it makes the whole experience less lonely. i wonder if that's what people are missing when they read a book: the book _club_ feeling.