StoryLark
◆ Open source · Preview v1.0.0

Read it. Hear it.
Carry it with you.

StoryLark is an open-source engine for building your own branded, installable app for reading and listening to standalone stories, complete books, or both.

Try the live demo → Get started View on GitHub

One codebase → many branded reading apps. The recommended installer deploys to Cloudflare; Azure is supported too.

The StoryLark mark — a lark ascending toward a rising sun
What it does

A complete reading app, out of the box

Everything a modern story-reading PWA needs — reading, narration, offline, and sync — driven entirely by your brand's config.

Read mode

Clean, typographically careful chapter reading with a literary serif and thoughtful spacing.

Listen mode

Pre-generated neural TTS narration with word-synced read-along highlighting, and a Web Speech fallback.

Offline

Download chapters — text and audio — for airplane mode. It's a real installable PWA.

Cross-device sync

Sign in and continue on any device — progress, bookmarks, and preferences sync. Offline downloads stay on the device that downloaded them.

Push updates

Readers get notified the moment a new chapter publishes — payload-less web push.

Themeable

A per-brand brand.json + theme.css token contract drives the entire look. One engine, many faces.

Two ways to make it yours

Re-skin it, or restructure it

StoryLark separates how it looks from how it's arranged — so most people change a few tokens, and power users can rebuild the experience.

Theme · branding

Build your own theme

Retune the visual identity: colors, fonts, logo, icons, and imagery through a documented CSS token contract with full light + dark support.

  • Copy the base brand, edit theme.css
  • Every token mirrored for dark mode
  • Swap the logo, icons, and manifest

Most users only want this. Browse ready-made themes in the gallery →

Template · structure

Build your own presentation

Rearrange the front-end structure and UX — navigation, layout, and how the library, reader, and player compose — on the presentation layer.

  • Configure layout and nouns
  • Flat list vs. series / hierarchy
  • Reader & player composition

For power users who want to rearrange, not just re-skin. See presentation templates in the gallery →

How it works

From markdown to a narrated, installable app

Bring standalone stories, multi-chapter books, or a mixed library. The pipeline turns plain markdown into a narrated, offline-ready app.

1

Brand it

Add a brand under brands/<id>/ — identity in brand.json, visual tokens in theme.css. Origins and TTS config live in a separate per-install deployment.json, so a theme never carries someone else's server addresses.

2

Publish content

Run your markdown through the publish pipeline: chapter JSON + neural-TTS audio + word timings, uploaded to R2.

3

Deploy

Provision D1 + R2, point Wrangler at your brand, and ship the Worker to your own domain on Cloudflare.

markdown → chapter JSON + TTS audio + word timings → R2 → your app
Built on the edge

One Worker. No servers to babysit.

The default deployment is one Cloudflare Worker with a Hono API, backed by D1 and R2 and designed for the free tiers. An Azure deployment path is also included.

Cloudflare Workers D1 database R2 object storage Hono API Vite + Preact PWA Neural TTS narration

Build your own reading app

Create a publisher site with npm, brand it, publish stories or books, and ship it to your own domain. Clone the engine only when you plan to develop or fork StoryLark itself.

Read the guide Try the live demo Browse the gallery