The platform · free
A book, read closely enough to be questioned
The Core is not a trial of the paid products. It is the reading floor everything else is built on, and on its own it turns a book and its narration into something you can search, cite, annotate and hand to somebody else.
Getting the book in
An ePub and its audiobook, lined up sentence by sentence
You give it the book and the narrated recording of the same edition — one audio file or a whole folder of them in listening order. It splits the audio by chapter, transcribes it, and binds each stretch of narration to the sentences it reads. That alignment is what makes every later surface able to play the words it is showing you.
- Upload from your own machine; an audiobook may be several files in listening order
- Chapter split, transcription and sentence-level alignment on the narration’s own word timings
- How each chapter was bound to the audio is shown, and you can review it
- A parse concern is reported, never a refusal — you decide whether it matters
- The audio and the ePub must be the same edition, or the alignment will drift
Screenshot slot
Ingest — the ePub and the audiobook, with per-stage progress
Reading it
The prose, with the narration following along
Book Text shows the words while the audiobook reads them, sentence by sentence. Mark it up as you read, pull the illustrations out of the ePub itself, and keep the timeline in view so you always know where in the recording you are.
- Sentence-level follow-along with a mini player
- Annotation over the prose
- The ePub’s own images, extracted and browsable
- A timeline bound to the same alignment
Screenshot slot
Book Text and the mini player, mid-chapter
Breaking it down
Scenes, beats, and everyone in them
Each chapter is divided into scenes and beats, and the cast of characters, props and locations is pulled out along with how they change over the story — a wound, a wardrobe change, a burned-down house. You review and approve the roster at its gate; the events, scenes and beats follow after it.
- Scene and beat decomposition per chapter
- An entity roster you approve, with facets that change across the book
- Arcs and threads traced across scenes
- Chapter and whole-book summaries
Screenshot slot
Entity Roster — the cast as the studio found it, awaiting approval
Asking it things
Answers that cite the page they came from
The Book Assistant answers against what has been built — one book, a selection, or every ingested book in the portfolio at once. Every answer cites the passages it drew on, and clicking a citation opens that place in the prose rather than a search result.
- Ask across one book, several, or a whole portfolio
- Citations click through into the sentence
- Semantic search over the same material
- An answer that used an outside source says so — and one that used it without attributing it says that too
Screenshot slot
Book Assistant — an answer, its sources, and a citation opened in place
Bringing in what is not in the book
Outside sources, approved and fetched politely
A wiki, an author interview, a review, or text you paste in — registered, named the way you want them said, and attached to the organisation, a portfolio or one title. Fetching obeys robots.txt, a crawl delay, a page cap and a daily budget, and is only ever started by a person.
- Sources attached at the org, portfolio or book level
- Citations coloured by what the source is worth — the author, or a fan wiki
- The cached passage is shown in place, with who said it and when it was read
- A domain block list, and a person on the far end of every fetch
Screenshot slot
Reference Library — registered sources and their attachments
Reviewing it
Every stage stops and waits for you
A run produces artifacts and lands. It does not proceed, notify you and proceed anyway. The review inbox is where work waits, the run dashboard is where you see what happened, and a rejection cascades: the studio supersedes the run and everything downstream that rested on it.
- 1
Run
Stage
Produces artifacts, records cost, publishes an event.
- 2
Needs review
Inbox
Attributable to the run that made it, with the artifacts attached.
- 3
Decide
You
Approve · rework · reject · or select individual artifacts without closing the run.
- 4
Cascade
The studio
A rejection supersedes descendants rather than leaving orphans behind.
The same four beats govern every stage in every product. Learning them once is learning the whole application.
What is yours
Your books stay on your disk
The server holds everything — the books, the audio, the renders, the masters, the exports — in a volume on the host you deployed it to. There is no account on our infrastructure because there is no infrastructure of ours in the path.
- In: ePub, and a narrated audiobook in the usual audio formats.
- Out: a chaptered m4b, and the artifacts each product produces.
- Storage: SQLite and files in one volume. No database server to run.
- Leaves the machine: the text and prompts sent to your AI provider, and whatever your own GPU hosts receive. Nothing else.
Running it for other people
Organisations, roles and scopes
One install can hold more than one organisation, and the Core ships four roles before any product adds its own: Administrator, Creator, Reviewer and Story Editor. Settings live at five separate scopes — this machine, this book, this series, this organisation, this install — in five separate windows, so nobody reaches the price of a GPU hour by tabbing sideways from which portfolio to reopen.
The Your Products screen shows all four products against two independent facts: whether you are licensed, and whether the product is installed on this machine. A product you have bought but do not yet have is a row that says so, rather than a silence.
Extension points
Where it is meant to be changed
Recipes
The step sequences casting and the other verticals walk, declared as configuration rather than code.
Blueprints
ComfyUI workflows conformed into file-based blueprints, imported and validated before they can be submitted.
Reference sources
What the assistant is allowed to read outside the book, and how politely it may fetch it.
Cost rates
GPU-hour, machine-hour, per-image and token rates. All default to zero and say so until you set them.
These are configuration surfaces, not a public plugin API. There is no add-on SDK for third parties today, and the add-on channel only loads archives signed with a key compiled into the Core.
Getting started
Five steps, once
Two of them are for whoever runs the server — which, for most people reading this, is also you.
- 01
Deploy the server
Load the image, copy the compose bundle, set a signing secret and your AI provider key, and bring it up.
- 02
Install the desktop Core
One installer for your platform. It holds no server and no products.
- 03
Sign in
The Core reconciles the products your organisation is licensed for — installing, upgrading or removing them.
- 04
Open a portfolio
The folder for an author, a series or a franchise. Every book lives inside one.
- 05
Add the book
Point it at the ePub and the audiobook, and let the ingest run.