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#kindle

25 posts22 participants1 post today

Today's #OpenSource recommendation (which given the recent glut conversations about moving away from #Kindle may be relevant to a lot of you!) is Storyteller (smoores.gitlab.io/storyteller/)

Leaving the Amazon Kindle/Audible duopoly had one big downside for me: losing #Whispersync (For anyone who never used it, if you owned both the audiobook and the ebook then you could switch back and forth between them, and Whispersync would keep them in sync for you - e.g. you could listen to the audio book while commuting home from work on your phone, then grab your kindle as you sat on the sofa, and it would be on the same page you'd been listening to automatically). Not everyone likes reading books this hybrid way, but I loved it.

Well, Storyteller brings that back. You feed it a drm-free epub and a drm-free audiobook, and it processes them and spits out a combined epub that contains the audio book as a media overlay. This gets you that same behavior of being able to switch back and forth between the audio and the text, with them kept perfectly in sync. Having freed my Kindle and Audible library from Amazon's drm last month, I've been running them through Storyteller this weekend, and the results are pretty perfect, aligned precisely sentence-by-sentence with each other.

The downsides: First, It's not a quick process to get the books aligned (part of the process is using speech-to-text to transcribe the audiobook with timestamps, so the algorithm can then align it with the epub's text, which takes several hours per book). If you've got a recent Nvidia or AMD GPU in your computer you can massively reduce this time, but it's a bit of a pain to get setup, so the size of your library will dictate if this effort is worth it for you.

Second, The output files are in the Epub3 format, and so require and Epub3 compatible reader - if you're happy reading off your phone, storyteller provide their own apps for this, but you might struggle if you use a physical ebook reader, as (despite the 3 standard being over a decade old now) a lot of them don't support it. In addition the epub file sizes are huge, as they contain the audiobook, so even if you have a compatible reader, it will massively reduce the number of books you can store. (And potentially cause much slower loading times as well)

Finally, an #OSS warning: while the Storyteller server and apps are fully open source, the alignment process makes use of OpenAI's Whisper speech-to-text model for the transcribing step. That's an 'open' model in that the model itself has been released under the MIT license; but I don't really consider it an Open Source model because neither the training data nor the code that created it are open. I'm pragmatic enough to use it here, but be aware of that fact while using it.

smoores.gitlab.ioStoryteller Docs | StorytellerA self-hosted platform for automatically aligning ebooks and audiobooks.

lol so when you add up the amount of kindle unlimited titles i have plus the pdfsand other ebooks ive uploaded my #kindle library is 750 #books thats a lot! i cant wait to see where i'm at in january when i meet my goal but it will definitely bleed over into next year because i just dont think it is possible for me to read that many books in one year! not that and all the other stuff i do!

Seeing folks with the #Kindle blues and just want to say I've owned a Boox #ereader for a few years and they are essentially just Android tablets with e-ink screens. Easy to buy from Bezos if you want, but also runs Libby and Hoopla and apps from other ebook retailers. Also trivially easy to load books you've purchased or downloaded elsewhere.
I have no financial stake in Boox! Wish I did!

[EDIT: RISOLTO, vedi risposte]

Qualche giorno fa ho letto un toot in una discussione riguardante il #kindle che diceva più o meno così: se non ti interessa la connessione internet e la possibilità di fare acquisti direttamente su amazon puoi installarci il sistema operativo taldeitali. Non ho messo il toot tra i segnalibri e non sono in grado di ritrovarlo, ma magari qualcunə di voi l'ha salvato, o forse con qualche boost ben assestato riesco a raggiungere lə scrivente/hackerante

After paying 20 bucks to get ads removed on my old-ish #Kindle Paperwhite, not getting what I paid for, and a few back-and-forths with the #Amazon customer service, I am told that it is not possible to be done.

Like, what makes it so dificult to remotely turn on a damn toggle button? Then, why do you even offer it to me in the first place.

Anyway, I think I might be looking for an affordable and DRM-free #ebook reader alternative.

Any suggestions are more than welcome.