--- title: Announcing tale.fyi: read (or listen) to an entire book... description: tale.fyi is a new web platform for reading and listening to public domain fiction books via a single shareable link. It integrates Project Gutenberg texts,... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/announcing-tale-fyi-read-or-listen-to-an-entire-book-from-a-single-link--yoqhonke3 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Announcing tale.fyi: read (or listen) to an entire book from a single link. | daily.dev og:description: tale.fyi is a new web platform for reading and listening to public domain fiction books via a single shareable link. It integrates Project Gutenberg texts,... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/announcing-tale-fyi-read-or-listen-to-an-entire-book-from-a-single-link--yoqhonke3 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/yoqHoNKe3.png og:image:alt: Announcing tale.fyi: read (or listen) to an entire book from a single link. og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Announcing tale.fyi: read (or listen) to an entire book from a single link. **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 2 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary tale.fyi is a new web platform for reading and listening to public domain fiction books via a single shareable link. It integrates Project Gutenberg texts, Standard Ebooks formatting, and LibriVox audio recordings, offering seamless switching between reading and listening modes with progress saving. The platform also allows users to publish their own fiction while retaining full ownership of their content and audience. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 80 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-07-29). **TL;DR:** The community is enthusiastic about tale.fyi's clean reading experience and especially its neural CTC-based audio-text alignment (dubbed 'Whispersync for the open web'), with many offering constructive UX feedback; a side thread debated the best Letterboxd-for-books alternatives. **Sentiment:** 72% positive · 20% mixed · 8% skeptical **The case for** - The CTC forced-alignment approach syncing LibriVox audio to text is seen as technically clever and genuinely useful. - Clean typography and deep-linking/paragraph anchoring are appreciated. - The builder is highly responsive, shipping fixes (PWA orientation, light/dark toggle) in real time during the thread. - ActivityPub-based Bookwyrm and apps like Hardcover are surfaced as solid Letterboxd-for-books options by the community. **The pushback** - Autoplay of audio on book pages is considered jarring by at least one commenter. - Magic-link-only auth (no passwords) frustrates users who rely on password managers. - No font-size control beyond browser zoom is a missing basic reading feature. - Word-level highlighting during audio playback is absent, causing a disconnect between eyes and ears. - Some books (e.g. Moby Dick) fail the confidence gate and ship without read-along audio. **By community** - hackernews (positive): Commenters are broadly enthusiastic about the technical approach and UX, with active back-and-forth between the builder and users producing real-time fixes and feature ideas. **Hottest debate:** Whether magic-link-only authentication is better or worse than passwords/passkeys for users who rely on password managers. **Open questions** - Will word-level highlighting during audio playback be added as an option? - Will non-English (e.g. French) LibriVox libraries be supported? - Will the forced-alignment pipeline be open-sourced as a standalone project? - How will tale.fyi handle discovery of other users' paragraph notes beyond direct links? **Highlights** > 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! > — [khanhnguyen8386 on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49084791) > 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 > — [samuelcole on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49084532) > 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. > — [tim-projects on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49085790) > > 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. > — [yreg on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49085570) > 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. > — [gabriel666smith on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49084625) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49083389) · 34 points · 80 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [4 legit sources that keep my e-reader full of free books](https://daily.dev/posts/4-legit-sources-that-keep-my-e-reader-full-of-free-books-wpg7daadq) · XDA Developers · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [I use this local AI tool to turn boring documents into cool narrations](https://daily.dev/posts/i-use-this-local-ai-tool-to-turn-boring-documents-into-cool-narrations-sdiyrvnaw) · XDA Developers · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Audible’s new ‘Read & Listen’ feature syncs your Kindle ebooks with audiobooks](https://daily.dev/posts/audible-s-new-read-listen-feature-syncs-your-kindle-ebooks-with-audiobooks-fl8dyg9ve) · TechCrunch · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Readleif](https://daily.dev/posts/readleif-wbesjbhal) · Pascal’s scribbles · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [A startup, Everand, is now bundling ebooks, audiobooks, and book clubs in challenge to Amazon](https://daily.dev/posts/a-startup-everand-is-now-bundling-ebooks-audiobooks-and-book-clubs-in-challenge-to-amazon-4p6bzhshh) · TechCrunch · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#webdev](https://daily.dev/tags/webdev), [#text-to-speech](https://daily.dev/tags/text-to-speech) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/announcing-tale-fyi-read-or-listen-to-an-entire-book-from-a-single-link--yoqhonke3) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Announcing tale.fyi: read (or listen) to an entire book from a single link.","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/announcing-tale-fyi-read-or-listen-to-an-entire-book-from-a-single-link--yoqhonke3","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/announcing-tale-fyi-read-or-listen-to-an-entire-book-from-a-single-link--yoqhonke3"},"datePublished":"2026-07-28T14:13:01.088Z","dateModified":"2026-07-29T03:35:19.228Z","description":"tale.fyi is a new web platform for reading and listening to public domain fiction books via a single shareable link. 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