Scale of Us

Small books about big machines and the humans trying not to forget themselves.

This is a reusable illustrated-book platform for scaleofus.com. The Boy Who Tried to Catch the Wind is the first book. Each book supplies a manuscript, timings, artwork, narration, and a small configuration object; the shared reader owns playback, follow-along navigation, responsive fitting, word highlighting, and memory-conscious drawing activation.

Commands

npm install
npm run dev
npm run build
npm run build:pages
npm run new:book -- a-lowercase-slug "The Book Title"
npm run prepare:audio -- a-lowercase-slug "/absolute/path/to/narration.wav"

npm run build creates a production build, removes authoring-only experiments, and enforces reader budgets. npm run build:pages additionally replaces docs/ with that validated build for GitHub Pages.

Structure

• src/books/ is the book registry. Each book keeps its manuscript, configuration, and compact timing JSON together.
• src/components/StoryReader.astro is the shared reader shell.
• src/lib/story-reader.ts parses and validates manuscripts, voices, artwork, and timing contracts at build time.
• src/scripts/story-player.ts owns the audio clock and reading/listening state machine.
• public/books/<slug>/ is the default home for a new book's runtime audio and artwork. Existing older paths remain supported.
• /library/ is derived from the registry, so a registered book appears there without a second content list.

The current first book lives in src/books/the-boy-who-tried-to-catch-the-wind/. Its drawing sources remain in public/images/wind-story/, and its compressed narration remains in public/audio/.

Read STORY_READER_TEMPLATE.md before adding a book. It documents the plug-in contract, timing workflow, and performance rules.

Publishing

Run npm run build:pages, commit the source changes and generated docs/ folder, then push main. GitHub Pages publishes from main and /docs.