Storyteller

Shane Friedman

About this app

Storyteller is a self-hosted platform for creating and reading ebooks with synced narration. It's made of of three components: the API server, the web interface, and the mobile apps. Together, these components allow you to take audiobooks and ebooks that you already own and automatically synchronize them, as well as read or listen to (or both!) the resulting synced books.

Storyteller provides two relatively unique use cases:

- Providing a better experience for readers that wish to be able to switch between listening to a book in audiobook format and reading it as a digital, visual book
- Providing a guided narration experience for users that would like to listen to a book's narration while reading it.

Storyteller is also self-hosted software. This means that instead of running on servers owned by a company or other organization, it runs on your servers. You own your content and your data, and it will always be available to you!

Ratings and reviews

I self host this on a small and quite old mini PC. It runs incredibly well and have never had any performance issues with it aside from it occasionally not syncing between my devices but that is of very little consequence especially if you make sure to close the app on the previous device first. My only other feedback is on the menu. The main page is excellent but on the web-page you can access multiple tabs including the whole library and series which you can't directly access on mobile clients

This app is really underrated. The UI is very simple yet clean and practical. Plus, I loved that you provided the theme customisation. Here is one feature request: Having an inbuilt/external dictionary option.

I gave a 2 only because the server app works really well, but the phone app only lets you read and not listen. Great idea!

What’s new

fixed (2 changes)
- Fix Android seek increment and iOS remote next/prev behavior by @smoores
- Persist Android Auto progress via Headless JS by @noah.bare

added (2 changes)
- EpubView: Disable the swipe gesture in scroll mode. by @t-real
- Use separate playback speeds for listening and readaloud by @t-real

maintenance (1 change)
- Expo 56 by @smoores

changed (1 change)
- Set seek forward to 30s, back to 15s by @smoores