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What is Storyteller?

Storyteller is a self-hosted, open source platform for automatically aligning audiobooks and ebooks, and reading ebooks with aligned audio. That’s a very dense sentence, so let’s break it down a bit:

self-hosted means that Storyteller runs on your computer, not mine. When you add a book to Storyteller, it’s saved to your hard drive, and only you have control over what happens with your Storyteller instance’s data.

open source means that that anyone can read (and reuse) the code that makes up Storyteller. It’s publicly available on GitLab, in the smoores/storyteller repo.

aligning audibooks and ebooks is Storyteller’s primary purpose. You can provide Storyteller with the audiobook and ebook for the same book, and it will produce a new, aligned ebook, with the audio baked in.

ebooks with aligned audio — also called “guided narration” or “media overlays” — allows you to switch back and forth between reading and listening to a book without ever losing your place. You can even read and listen at the same time, and the Storyteller reader app (or any other app compatible with EPUB Media Overlays!) will highlight the current sentence as it reads.

I’m a firm believer in the value of free, open source, software. This is why Storyteller is licensed with the MIT license, meaning anyone is free to use the code that makes up Storyteller however they please, including in other projects. And I think that everyone should be give the opportunity to truly own their media, even when it’s digital, which is why Storyteller is designed to be self-hosted, rather than a service that I run myself and others pay to use.

However, not everyone is interested in learning how to run software like Storyteller themselves. Storyteller isn’t just an app that you can install on your phone or laptop — it’s a full stack platform, with a backend server that needs to be running at all times. And Storyteller has proven to have an appeal beyond the niche community of self-hosting enthusiasts — reading books with guided narration is really valuable!

So, with an eye toward making Storyteller accessible to more folks, and without compromising the principles of self-hosting and digital media ownership, I’m genuinely ecstatic to announce that Storyteller is now available on PikaPods!

What is PikaPods?

PikaPods is a paid service for hosting open source apps like Storyteller. You can decide what resources are necessary to meet your needs, scale your pods up or down as needed, and deploy new apps with the click of a button.

PikaPods also shares profits with open source developers, so by using Storyteller on PikaPods, you’re also funding future Storyteller development. And PikaPods has dozens of other open source apps available, many of which I use myself!

After a potential Storyteller user asked for a way for less technically inclined folks to access Storyteller, I reached out to the folks at PikaPods. They were kind and responsive, happily answered all of my questions, and after just two weeks had Storyteller up and running.

What else do I need to know?

Storyteller is a fairly resource intensive application. Audiobooks are usually very long, so transcoding them, transcribing them, and running Storyteller’s forced alignment algorithm uses a lot of memory, a lot of CPU, and a lot of time. This means that Storyteller has larger default resource requirements on PikaPods than many other apps do. It also defaults to re-encoding audio with the OPUS audio codec, which helps with memory usage, as well as reducing the eventual file size for the aligned books. Even so, you may find that you need to bump up the memory allocations for your pod if you regularly align very long books.

PikaPods also doesn’t have any GPUs available, so transcription has to run on the CPU, which can be slow. If you choose, you can configure a hosted transcription service — like OpenAI Cloud, AWS Transcribe, or Google Cloud Speech-to-Text — in the Storyteller settings. These are paid services, but they tend to be much, much faster than running transcription on the CPU.

As always, if you need help with Storyteller, reach out on Matrix, Discord, or Discourse.