Eaglemoss https://www.eaglemoss.com
Eaglemoss acquired Story Teller from Cavendish Marsall in 2008. Eaglemoss is the world’s leading partwork publisher and licensed collectible company, having produced, marketed and distributed more than 150 collections in more than 30 markets across 5 continents and in 13 different languages.
This is a personal project, and is not affiliated or endorsed by Eaglemoss.
Each folder is a single story from the Story Teller series, using a Read Aloud EPUB format. It contains SMIL meta data to synchronise the audio with each each page of the book. I have only tested this with Apple Books. There was no indivual cover page for each story, so for now I simply repeat the first page as the cover page.
Right now it just has a few books, I will keep adding more - there are soooooooo many wonderful stories. The complete list can be seen here:
- https://storytellerwebsite.wordpress.com/the-collection/story-teller-1/
- https://storytellerwebsite.wordpress.com/the-collection/story-teller-2/
Use ecancrusher, https://www.docdataflow.com/ecancrusher/, to create the compressed epub files that you can drop into Apple Books. Just drag the EPUB folder and drop on the ecancrusher app icon.
I have added author, illustrator and narrator data for each book. I don't know the dates for each publication, so just set it to Jan 1982 for now.
I used this tutorial as the basis for the creation of these EPUB projects. https://www.albertopettarin.it/blog/2014/08/02/how-to-create-epub-3-read-aloud-ebooks.html
I used Calibre, https://calibre-ebook.com, to author the books and Audacity to export the audio labels to create the SMIL data, https://www.audacityteam.org. I added the Audacity exported labels to each EPUB folder.
For practicality, I've chosen to split the audio per page. A later effort could look to provide finer granuality, for a better experience, to allow selection of columns or sections as the resume point. It's not always possible to get a perfect split point for each page. For example there are occassions when the narrator's voice, or background sound effect, overlaps the page turn ping. Also the audio recording, and ping, was made for two page layout - which makes it hard to always cleanly split the SMIL during mid sentence across those two pages.
Right now I'm doing this by hand, but I may eventually look to build some templating scripts to help semi automate some of this.
Please just look at an existing EPUB to see the conventions and layout I used, if you wish to contribute new books.
Help is please needed, Pull Requests are very welcome.
- Please review the EPUBs and let me know if there are mistakes. Incorrect images, TOCs and Nav. Issues or improvements with audio synchronisation points.
- Improved EPUB compatability.
- Metadata fixes, improvements or additions.
- Submit new EPUB books. I'll keep trying to do this, but it takes time :(
I'm new to EPUB so if there any experts out there, please let me know how I can improve this.
All images and audio files in each of the EPUB folders is the copyright material of Eaglemoss - https://en-gb.eaglemoss.com. Those images and audio files may not be distributed in any form, derived or whole, without the express permission of Eaglemoss. I have contacted Eaglemoss to request permission for inclusion in this Open Source project - or atleat a way to legally purchase them. If they decline I will remove the images and audio and then rewrite GIT history to fully remove them. People will then need to source them, from the many "alternative" places that already exist, and combine them with the provided skeleton EPUB projects for personal use only.
The remaining metadata, to create the EPUBs, is available under Creative Commons Zero. https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/
https://storytellerwebsite.wordpress.com https://storytellerme.bandcamp.com/releases https://www.facebook.com/groups/storytellerpartwork/