rebecca-shoptaw / open-editions

Aesthetically pleasing audiobook player designed to mimic the feeling of reading a physical book. 📖✨

Open Editions 📖✨

An aesthetically pleasing audiobook player designed to mimic the feeling of reading a physical book.

Live Site

Background & Mission

As an avid reader with a visual memory, I often struggle with the generic and sometimes cluttered web interfaces of audiobook sites. I built the initial version of this site in a moment of desperation, when I was trying to listen to an audiobook of The Count of Monte Cristo and found myself wishing there was a way to listen that would look and feel less like a generic website and more like a physical edition of the book.

Once the first version was built, I realized that this could be a great site to expand and make public for three reasons:

1. To make the audiobook experience more pleasant
2. To highlight the amazing Librivox catalog of public domain audiobooks
3. To promote and make more accessible the reading of classic literature

Features

• Customized cover images: Classical paintings selected to represent book content; if no cover image selected, will implement randomized selection from a set of paintings
• Minimal mode: Option to hide all unnecessary buttons and info and focus on the reading experience

All audiobooks sourced from the Librivox library of free public domain audiobooks, hosted via Archive.org

Built With

Next Steps

• Build starter homepage to navigate between current titles
• Switch to Art Institute of Chicago API to retrieve cover images
• Build new cover image data structure & associated functions
• Search functionality using the Librivox API
• Migrate styling from CSS -> SASS
• Begin building animations with GSAP

Long-term Goals

• Use Librivox RSS feed to rebuild player from scratch
• Create bookmark functionality using localStorage to save user's place
• Build and release mobile app version using React Native
• Create "back of book" view to display more detailed book info (and cover credits) without interrupting audio play
• Enable user-submitted cover suggestions
• Transfer site from GitHub pages to Vercel or AWS, with a separate custom domain
• Work with a team to create a backend to allow for account login and features like saving progress, creating TBR and favorites lists, and accessing reading history

License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE.txt for more information.

Contact

Rebecca Shoptaw - [email protected]

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