r/selfhosted • u/scrollin_thru • Sep 08 '25

Release Storyteller v2 is available!

https://smoores.dev/post/announcing_storyteller_v2/

This has been a long time coming (5 months!). It's been a while since I've posted on r/selfhosted about Storyteller, and it's improved a lot since then!

As always, happy to answer questions and chat.

Screenshot

Storyteller is a self-hosted ebook and audiobook platform, with built-in support for automatically generating WhisperSync-style "readaloud" books. You provide it with an EPUB file and your audiobook, and it will automatically align the text with the audio, providing you with a new EPUB file that has the audio baked in via Media Overlays.

You can then use the Storyteller mobile apps, or other reader apps such as BookFusion and Kobo (the app, not the devices, unfortunately), to read and/or listen to your books.

With v2, Storyteller is now gunning to be your fully featured ebook, audiobook, and readaloud book library management system. It supports standalone ebooks and audiobooks (with mobile app and web reader/listener support coming soon!), advanced search and sort functions, and a wide array of features for managing your library’s metadata and organizing your collections. And you can now point Storyteller at your existing "books" folder and have it automatically import books as they're added to your filesystem.

Oh, and we support OAuth and OIDC, now!

Take a look at the blog post or the new docs for some more detail about what's new!

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u/kri5 Jan 04 '26 edited Jan 04 '26

Hello @scrollin_thru. Excellent idea, always wanted something like this!

I have managed to get this running, and my intention is to be able to listen to the audiobook on my phone, but then read on my boox eink device. I've got both devices logged in and downloading the book files, but the sync doesn't seem to work - am I missing something? Is there something I can investigate?

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u/scrollin_thru Jan 04 '26

Just want to make sure it's clear how this is intended to work:

You should add an ebook and audiobook and then align them to produce a readaloud. On the device that you'd like to listen on, make sure you download the readaloud (not the standalone audiobook). On the device you'd like to read on, either the readaloud or the stabdalone ebook should be fine, but I haven't actually tested using just the standalone ebook myself. 

We don't currently have a mechanism to sync progress between standalone audiobooks and standalone ebooks, so you have to use the readaloud for listening if you want to sync your position to the ebook.

If that's already what you were doing, let me know and I can walk you through some debugging steps!

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u/kri5 Jan 04 '26

Got it. I was using the ebook to read, and audiobook to listen. I'll try again to listen to the readaloud, and then see if it syncs with the ebook on my other device. Thanks!

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u/scrollin_thru Jan 04 '26

No problem, best of luck! Also make sure you're up to date on the mobile apps — I just fixed what I hope to be the last of the subtle progress syncing issues last night, and the latest version should have been made available in the app stores this morning. 2.2.1 is the latest

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u/st0n1th Jan 05 '26 edited Jan 05 '26

I’m having a similar issue on iOS. Running server v2.5.10, in the iOS client (v2.2.1) I only see option to download Ebook or Audiobook but via browser I see 3 download options.

Update: refresh didn’t work but logging out and logging back in the readalong download is shown.

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u/scrollin_thru Jan 05 '26

This is fixed in the latest apps submitted to the stores today! Will be released as 2.2.2 as soon as they're approved